Joe Biden's commanding victory in South Carolina

February 5, 2024

I write a newsletter six days a week. I try to be measured and rational most days. But every once in a while, I am entitled to rant (as a point of personal privilege). I am exercising that privilege today. Skip this newsletter if you are looking for balm to soothe your troubled soul.

I will be addressing the results of the South Carolina Democratic primary. It’s possible you missed the news that Joe Biden won the South Carolina primary by a commanding margin. However, most of the news coverage of Biden over the weekend was devoted to polling based on landline telephone surveys—rather than actual election results—that allegedly show Trump is leading in the race for the general election. (He is not.)

Let me start my rant by noting that there is a parody account on Twitter called “New York Times Pitchbot.” The purpose of “Pitchbot” is to highlight the bias against Joe Biden in the headlines of the NYTimes. Each day, Pitchbot takes good news about Joe Biden and “pitches” proposed headlines to the Times’s editors that convert good news for Biden into bad news for Biden. It is, of course, using parody to make a point about bias in the Times’s coverage of President Biden.

Here are a few recent examples of proposed headlines from NYTimes Pitchbot:

• The US economy added a blockbuster 353,000 jobs in January, far exceeding expectations of 180,000. Here's why that's bad news for Joe Biden.

• The fact that Trump spent $50 million on lawyers in 2023 proves that he is creating jobs even when he’s out of office. 

• Is Biden's economy creating too many jobs?

• Why a Taylor Swift endorsement could actually hurt Joe Biden.

You get the point. Here’s the problem: No matter how hard Pitchbot tries, the real bias exhibited by the Times exceeds the parody of Pitchbot. Which is saying a lot.

Over the weekend, Joe Biden crushed the South Carolina primary by winning more than 95% of the vote in every county in South Carolina. Every county. He exceeded 95% of the vote in counties with significant proportions of Black voters. He exceeded 95% of the vote in counties with nearly 100% white voters. Biden crushed it. See Axios, Biden racks up massive margins in South Carolina show of force.

Biden. Crushed. It.

There were two Democratic challengers in the race whose sole reason for running is to provide disaffected Democrats the opportunity to cast protest votes against Joe Biden. They received 2.1% and 1.7% percent of the vote, respectively, which is lower than the natural background level of voters in every population who are mad at the world and vote against every incumbent as a form of therapy.

In other words—Biden. Crushed. It.

After Biden’s commanding, unprecedented win in South Carolina, the NYTimes Pitchbot proposed this headline:

“Biden’s closer-than-expected 95-point win in today’s South Carolina primary could hint at general election weakness.”

The problem is that the real sub-header to the NYTimes’ headline about Joe Biden’s victory was this:

“Four years ago, Black voters in the state revitalized President Biden’s political fortunes. But Saturday’s repeat win is an uncertain measure of wider enthusiasm for his re-election bid.”

What?? Biden gets more than 95% of the votes by Black voters, and that is dismissed as an “uncertain measure” of enthusiasm in the Black community for Biden?

In the name of all that is good and pure, what more could Biden do to prove his support among the Black community? Receive 100% of the Black vote?? That is statistically impossible and would be a sure sign of a Soviet-style election!

The authors of the story go on to include the following gem in their description of Biden’s off-the-chart win:

Black voters are critical to Mr. Biden’s success in battleground states, but transposing South Carolina’s results in February to November . . . is a tricky proposition, given that Saturday’s primary was viewed by most observers — correctly, as it turned out — as noncompetitive.

What??? The race was not “noncompetitive!” Biden faced two “protest” candidates running on the platform that Biden is too old and infirm to serve a second term. Their protest candidacies received levels of support that are effectively zero and represent statistical noise in a large dataset. Biden. Crushed. It.

Notice that the Times’s reporters did not link to stories written by them before the election saying that the primary was “noncompetitive” and predicting that Biden would win by a crushing margin. If the writers “knew” that the race was noncompetitive beforehand, they surely would have graced us with their received wisdom—and reminded us of their prescience afterward. They did not.

In fact, Biden far exceeded the margins of victory predicted by polling! Or, as the Biden Wins twitter account posted,

President Biden outperformed polls by 30 points in South Carolina, but the media still refuses to give him the credit he deserves. Retweet to show the media you are a proud Biden Democrat.

Biden turned a referendum on his fitness into a rout, and the Times dismisses that victory by pretending—pretending—that the race was always “noncompetitive.” That is journalistic rationalization and post-facto retrofitting at its height.

And it wasn’t just the NYTimes that tried to twist Biden’s crushing victory into a supposedly “uncertain” measure of Biden’s general election prospects. Here is a screenshot of the Washington Post’s online edition the morning after Biden’s huge win:

A casual observer would reasonably conclude from the Washington Post front page that after South Carolina, Joe Biden is struggling with personal doubts as the tech economy crumbles—as opposed to having just crushed the South Carolina primary while America experiences the best economy in half a century.

And NBC and Steve Kornacki spent the weekend telling anyone who would listen that polling shows Donald Trump leading in the race for the general election. They are carrying water for Donald Trump, who has “flooded the zone” with low-quality polls designed to drag down Biden’s polling by fooling gullible (and willing) journalists.

Shame on NBC and Kornacki! They are still covering Trump as if he is a “horse” in a “race”—a model they know is broken. And even if the model were not broken, they normalize Trump every time they reduce him to a polling number—rather than describing him as an existential threat to democracy! When this is over, Kristen Welker and Steve Kornacki will have to look themselves in the mirror and ask themselves, “What did I do when our nation needed clarity and truth?”

If you can’t look away from the polls, you must follow Simon Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles. See, for example, his recent post (2/1), Republican Performance Problems Persist, Good Biden Polling.

The pundits who failed to predict that Biden would win more than 95% of the vote in the South Carolina primary immediately pivoted to “tsk-tsking” and “tut-tutting” about the allegedly low turnout levels compared to 2020—when there were six major candidates in the primary, including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and (of course), Joe Biden.

Yes, turnout was lower in South Carolina in 2024—but it was greater than the Republican turnout in the Iowa caucuses. How did the Washington Post describe Trump's victory when he received only 51% of a smaller turnout in Iowa? Here it is:

Got it? Trump gets 51% of the votes (or 56,260 votes) in Iowa and it is a “decisive” victory. Biden gets 95% of the votes (or 126,321 votes) in South Carolina, and it is an “uncertain” indicator of his future prospects!

I understand that it is a waste of time and energy to rail against the reckless, ignorant, and lazy journalistic practices of the major media. But tonight, I am angry at them because their “inside baseball,” cynical, click-baity approach to the 2024 election could affect the outcome—just as the media did in 2016 with its obsessive attention to the non-story of “Hillary’s emails.” (See Columbia Journalism Review, “In just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.”)

By writing about the shiny objects fed to them in 2016 by right-wing FBI agents in the New York field office, the NYTimes, WSJ, and other major media outlets were carrying Trump's water. Or perhaps it was Putin’s water. Either way, they affected the course of the 2016 election.

They seem perilously close to repeating that mistake in 2024 by normalizing Trump as a legitimate candidate who can be reduced to a number on a polling chart. Every journalist who participates in that normalization of Trump will be complicit if Trump wins.

The NYTimes Pitchbot explains the phenomenon in this fictitious headline recently pitched to the editors at the NYTimes:

I realize that my constant droning on about inflation and Biden’s old age may help get Trump elected and end our democracy. But that’s not my problem.

Newsflash to the editors of the NYTimes: It will be your problem if Trump is elected. He believes that the power of the president is absolute, and he has packed the Supreme Court with justices eager to do his bidding. If the editors at the Times believe that Trump will respect their rights under the First Amendment, they are bigger fools than they have already proven themselves to be.

The media is under no obligation to serve as Biden’s cheerleader. But as the above comparison of reporting on Trump's weak performance in Iowa and Biden’s commanding performance in South Carolina proves, the media inexplicably promotes Trump and undermines Biden. It makes no sense at time when the two men are surrogates for tyranny and democracy, respectively.

Concluding Thoughts.

Back to our normal programming tomorrow. But it is maddening to watch media malpractice day after day. If I didn’t write a daily newsletter, I would look away occasionally, but that is not possible in the present circumstances. Apologies for the extended rant, if you are still with me!

Here are the stories that we will likely talk about in the coming week:

• On Thursday at 10 a.m., the Supreme Court will hear oral argument on the disqualification of Trump from the Colorado ballot.

• Also, the Senate has released its immigration / Ukraine / Israel funding bill. See AP, Senators release a border and Ukraine deal but the House speaker declares it ‘dead on arrival’.

• The US continues to carry out air strikes in the Middle East in response to Iran-backed militias attacking US troops and Houthi rebels attacking commercial shipping.

• Joe Biden rigged the Grammy Awards on Sunday evening so that Taylor Swift could win Album of the Year, setting up Swift’s endorsement of Joe Biden at the Super Bowl half-time show.

For a guy with “uncertain” prospects, Biden does a good job of controlling the NFL, the music industry, Hollywood, and elections across America. Maybe the major media outlets should write about that. It couldn’t be worse than interpreting every Biden victory as a “worrisome” development for his prospects in November.

Talk to you tomorrow!