How Much of This is Fox News's Fault?
A study came out last month in the "American Economic Review" attributing much of the nation's recent drift to the populist right directly to the rise of Fox News, and served up numbers to back them up. John Kerry, they claimed, would have performed 3.6% better in 2004 and won the popular vote if not for the impact of Fox News. In 2008, Barack Obama would have supposedly gotten 6.3% more of the popular vote and won by a Reagan vs. Mondale style blowout. The election fundamentals of those years, especially 2008, did back up the notion that Democratic Presidential nominees should have performed stronger than they did. On the other hand, it seems impossible to control an experiment that could quantify the findings of the published study with any scientific credibility. I'm inclined to give Fox News some credit for fometing a larger and more rigid conservative movement, but will document in the paragraphs ahead why I think the situation is more complicated than the study indicates.
Supporting the study's findings are the demographic shifts of long-standing Democratic strongholds into the GOP fold during the Bush years, which coincided with Fox News' meteoric rise. There are regions of the country ranging from western Pennsylvania to middle Tennessee to eastern Oklahoma that stubbornly clung to the Democratic Party through Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, and two terms of Clinton. Despite these voters being intuitively conservative, they endured the Democratic Party through turbulent culture wars such as Vietnam, abortion, and the "welfare queen" debate. Conservatives won the arguments on these issues but Democrats were still winning the war. Yet once Fox News came on the scene, the tide shifted in these ancestrally Democratic regions....despite the lack of pressing culture war touchstones beyond the Iraq War. And even as the Iraq War became widely unpopular in nearly all corners of the country, the conservative tide nonetheless kept rising in most of Middle America, even places that had been voting Democratic for generations.
And while it's mostly anecdotal, it's hard to imagine that Fox, combined with the ever-enlarging role of conservative talk radio over the same period, didn't play a role. Suddenly, the aging, conservative-leaning denizens of the heartland had easily accessible voices offering an eloquent viewpoint that validated a few of their pre-existing views, providing a foot in the door for a more wholesale transformation that led to a switching of parties. There is data down to the county level of who watches what and where they live, and Fox News viewers disproportionately dwell in dozens of counties that have flipped from 2-1 Democratic strongholds to 2-1 Republican strongholds over the past generation. That would indicate the network has largely succeeded in reaching its target audience and affecting political affiliation of potentially millions of Americans who may well be voting with their granddaddies' political party had the Fox News Network never existed.
But it strikes me that there's a lot more going on here. It's not as if the conservative message wasn't getting out in the pre-Fox News era when the country hitched its wagon overwhelmingly to Nixon and Reagan. Perhaps Hazard, Kentucky, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, stayed blue during those challenging cycles for Democrats, but the suburbs of just about every big city in America didn't. Overwhelming numbers of suburban voters swung to a crimson shade of Republican red and did so without any organized conservative media beyond obscure academic publications. Are we to believe the Democrats' electoral arguments were that much less persuasive in the lean 70s and 80s elections that they managed landslide defeats even without this media machine with its thumb effectively on scale for the opposition, as the aforementioned study alleges was the case during the Fox News era?
What else may have happened to swing large segments of the electorate so rigidly conservative during the era of Fox News's rise? The mass attrition of the liberal and reflexively Democratic World War II generation is no small matter. And the even more comprehensive attrition of labor unions is arguably an even bigger deal, particularly in some of the same socially conservative redoubts where Fox News viewership has soared. A generation ago, the prime political message that voters in West Virginia and southwest Pennsylvania, as a couple of key examples, got came from their union literature and phone banks. When the jobs and the unions went away, the vacuum was filled by conservatives on talk radio and cable news, serving up a diametrically opposite message. Had the unions existed to the same degree in 2004 and 2008 as they did a generation earlier, there would have been competing messages and a diminished vulnerability for the Democrats to losing millions of Clinton and Gore voters for whom casting a ballot for a Democrat today would be unthinkable.
The Fox News impact study focused on the 2004 and 2008 cycles, which makes its findings a bit dated in regards to its conclusion of maximal disruptive impact. One could certainly argue that a candidate like Donald Trump could never have ascended to power without an assist from a Fox News nation, but there's no real way to quantify that and it doesn't give enough credit to the uniqueness of Trump's victorious message comparative to what the two major parties had served up at any prior time in the lifetimes of most current voters. The two major pillars of Trump's message were opposition to immigration and trade policy, issues that have long defied traditional partisan affiliations. And as Trump proved with the winning coalition that he cobbled together which included many millions of Obama voters, the message almost assuredly broke through without the persuasive powers of a cable news network that averages about 2.3 million viewers a day amidst a declining and rapidly aging cohort of cable subscribers.
Issues of key political importance are constantly changing in America and political coalitions change with them. The suburban voters of the 70s and 80s swung to conservatives without the help of an organized right-wing media while the heartland hardened in support of conservatives a generation later in tandem with the rise of a right-wing media. And an entirely new conservative coalition is taking shape now even as Fox News often finds its lineup in third place in a three-network cable news field.....a coalition with large segments that voted consistently in opposition to Fox News' leanings up until November 8, 2016. A dynamic electorate in a constantly changing issue landscape is the driver of the overwhelming majority of our increasingly inelastic political environment. I'm not inclined to give Fox News as much credit and its critics would like for this transformation.
Supporting the study's findings are the demographic shifts of long-standing Democratic strongholds into the GOP fold during the Bush years, which coincided with Fox News' meteoric rise. There are regions of the country ranging from western Pennsylvania to middle Tennessee to eastern Oklahoma that stubbornly clung to the Democratic Party through Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, and two terms of Clinton. Despite these voters being intuitively conservative, they endured the Democratic Party through turbulent culture wars such as Vietnam, abortion, and the "welfare queen" debate. Conservatives won the arguments on these issues but Democrats were still winning the war. Yet once Fox News came on the scene, the tide shifted in these ancestrally Democratic regions....despite the lack of pressing culture war touchstones beyond the Iraq War. And even as the Iraq War became widely unpopular in nearly all corners of the country, the conservative tide nonetheless kept rising in most of Middle America, even places that had been voting Democratic for generations.
And while it's mostly anecdotal, it's hard to imagine that Fox, combined with the ever-enlarging role of conservative talk radio over the same period, didn't play a role. Suddenly, the aging, conservative-leaning denizens of the heartland had easily accessible voices offering an eloquent viewpoint that validated a few of their pre-existing views, providing a foot in the door for a more wholesale transformation that led to a switching of parties. There is data down to the county level of who watches what and where they live, and Fox News viewers disproportionately dwell in dozens of counties that have flipped from 2-1 Democratic strongholds to 2-1 Republican strongholds over the past generation. That would indicate the network has largely succeeded in reaching its target audience and affecting political affiliation of potentially millions of Americans who may well be voting with their granddaddies' political party had the Fox News Network never existed.
But it strikes me that there's a lot more going on here. It's not as if the conservative message wasn't getting out in the pre-Fox News era when the country hitched its wagon overwhelmingly to Nixon and Reagan. Perhaps Hazard, Kentucky, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, stayed blue during those challenging cycles for Democrats, but the suburbs of just about every big city in America didn't. Overwhelming numbers of suburban voters swung to a crimson shade of Republican red and did so without any organized conservative media beyond obscure academic publications. Are we to believe the Democrats' electoral arguments were that much less persuasive in the lean 70s and 80s elections that they managed landslide defeats even without this media machine with its thumb effectively on scale for the opposition, as the aforementioned study alleges was the case during the Fox News era?
What else may have happened to swing large segments of the electorate so rigidly conservative during the era of Fox News's rise? The mass attrition of the liberal and reflexively Democratic World War II generation is no small matter. And the even more comprehensive attrition of labor unions is arguably an even bigger deal, particularly in some of the same socially conservative redoubts where Fox News viewership has soared. A generation ago, the prime political message that voters in West Virginia and southwest Pennsylvania, as a couple of key examples, got came from their union literature and phone banks. When the jobs and the unions went away, the vacuum was filled by conservatives on talk radio and cable news, serving up a diametrically opposite message. Had the unions existed to the same degree in 2004 and 2008 as they did a generation earlier, there would have been competing messages and a diminished vulnerability for the Democrats to losing millions of Clinton and Gore voters for whom casting a ballot for a Democrat today would be unthinkable.
The Fox News impact study focused on the 2004 and 2008 cycles, which makes its findings a bit dated in regards to its conclusion of maximal disruptive impact. One could certainly argue that a candidate like Donald Trump could never have ascended to power without an assist from a Fox News nation, but there's no real way to quantify that and it doesn't give enough credit to the uniqueness of Trump's victorious message comparative to what the two major parties had served up at any prior time in the lifetimes of most current voters. The two major pillars of Trump's message were opposition to immigration and trade policy, issues that have long defied traditional partisan affiliations. And as Trump proved with the winning coalition that he cobbled together which included many millions of Obama voters, the message almost assuredly broke through without the persuasive powers of a cable news network that averages about 2.3 million viewers a day amidst a declining and rapidly aging cohort of cable subscribers.
Issues of key political importance are constantly changing in America and political coalitions change with them. The suburban voters of the 70s and 80s swung to conservatives without the help of an organized right-wing media while the heartland hardened in support of conservatives a generation later in tandem with the rise of a right-wing media. And an entirely new conservative coalition is taking shape now even as Fox News often finds its lineup in third place in a three-network cable news field.....a coalition with large segments that voted consistently in opposition to Fox News' leanings up until November 8, 2016. A dynamic electorate in a constantly changing issue landscape is the driver of the overwhelming majority of our increasingly inelastic political environment. I'm not inclined to give Fox News as much credit and its critics would like for this transformation.
posted by Mark at 7:37 PM
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