Five Vox headlines spanning exactly one year are a remarkable display of how wrong the media has gotten politics in the Donald Trump era.
“The Republican Party is broken,” Ezra Klein wrote in Vox Feb. 24 of last year, when it was starting to become clear Trump would be the Republican nominee for president.
“Parties are vehicles for structuring information,” he wrote. “Their role is literally to help voters decide by helping them choose whom to trust. The fact that Republican voters seem to prefer candidates whom their party is screaming not to trust reveals a profound failure in the GOP’s core role.”
The drumbeat from Vox continued right up to the presidential election, only growing in intensity.
March 1: “The Republican Party is truly, profoundly broken”
July 25: “A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die”
October 14: “A GOP strategist explains why the Republican Party is about to break in two”
Of course it turned out Vox, along with the vast majority of the media, was getting the election all wrong. In November, the Republican party assumed its greatest position of power in nearly a century, taking 33 governorships, the House and Senate, the presidency, and the balance of power in the Supreme Court. As The New York Times put it: The Republican party now controls “almost everything in American governance.”
In fact, it’s the Democrat Party that is splitting in two, divided between those who favor a relatively moderate approach of working with Trump and reaching out to the white working class voters who ditched them, and those who favor an extreme “total war” approach with Trump and a strategy of doubling down on appeals to voters on the basis of demographics.
Vox is totally on it this time though. “The key question of the DNC race: how broken is the Democratic Party?” Vox asks in a headline run Feb. 24, exactly one year after asserting the Republican party is in big trouble.
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