CHRIS CRUCIAL: How 'news deserts' explain the 2024 election 🏜️
PLUS: A BIG Democratic Senate recruit!
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1. The ‘news deserts’ theory of 2024
These may be the two most amazing paragraphs I have read about the election:
Donald Trump won the 2024 election with one of the smallest popular-vote margins in U.S. history, but in news deserts – counties lacking a professional source of local news – it was an avalanche. Trump won 91% percent of these counties over his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, according to an analysis of voting data by Medill Journalism School’s State of Local News project.
While Trump’s national popular-vote margin was just under 1.5%, his margin in news deserts was massive. He won these counties by an average of 54 percentage points.
I mean, holy crap.
There are obviously caveats here — most notably that counties without a local news source tend to be more rural and more rural counties are strongly pro-Trump so correlation isn’t always causation — but it’s not a giant stretch to suggest that voters with less access to credible and objective local news voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
Why? Not because they were uninformed — per se. But rather because the news they did get was entirely national in nature, and that news often overlooks the impact of specific policies proposed by the candidates on a local community.
Granted, people who live in places without local news don’t lack access to information about a presidential election. Even if there’s no local paper or TV station, they can easily turn to national news sources such as CNN, Fox News, the New York Times; to social media; or to party and candidate campaign material to get information about the race.
But news deserts do have the potential to affect voting behavior in important ways. When voters lose access to local news, they tend to gravitate toward national news sources, according to research by Joshua P. Darr, a professor of public communications at Syracuse University. This kind of news, by definition, focuses on broad national issues—abortion, immigration, the economy, etc.—without regard to local conditions.
I have written and talked about the hollowing out of local news for a while now. But this study puts the dearth of credible news outlets into sharp — and scary — relief. Because the economic model of local journalism failed before the economic model for national journalism, these news deserts are only growing — and fast.
Here’s the Associated Press in 2023 on that collapse:
The decline of local news in the United States is speeding up despite attention paid to the issue, to the point where the nation has lost one-third of its newspapers and two-thirds of its newspaper journalists since 2005.
An average of 2.5 newspapers closed each week in 2023 compared to two a week the previous year, a reflection of an ever-worsening advertising climate, according to a Northwestern University study issued Thursday. Most are weekly publications, in areas with few or no other sources for news.
“My concern is that the acceleration that we’re seeing is only going to worsen,” said Tim Franklin, who heads the local news initiative at Northwestern’s Medill journalism school.
At its current pace, the country will hit 3,000 newspapers closed in two decades sometime next year, with just under 6,000 remaining, the report said. At the same time, 43,000 newspaper journalists lost jobs, most of them at daily publications, with the advertising market collapsing.
This is bad. Bad. BAD.
Nature abhors a vacuum and, unfortunately, what has filled the void left by the closure of so many local news outlets are purely partisan outfits designed not to educate the public but to indoctrinate persuade them.
As Axios wrote in June: “There are at least 1,265 websites identified as being backed by dark money or are intentionally masquerading as local news sites for political purposes.”
This problem will NOT fix itself. How can we fix it? Support local newsrooms — like the San Antonio Report. And Colorado Politics.
What other local news site are out there? I want to put together a list for people to bookmark and donate to. Send them my way! Put a comment in or email me at cillizzac@gmail.com.
2. Roy Cooper enters the chat
For a hot minute in the late summer, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper was seen as a potential VP for Kamala Harris. Harris moved on and Cooper is set to leave office after two terms early next year.
But, he may not be done with politics — which is very good for Democrats.
Asked Friday about the possibility of running for the Senate in 2026, Cooper said this: “I love public service. I want to keep helping North Carolina and our country. I haven't made that decision yet, but it's on the table.”
Which, 👀.
Cooper would be a home run recruit for Democrats in a state that, if they want to make any noise about taking back the majority in 2026, they must find a way to contest.
The seat is currently held by GOP Sen. Thom Tillis. Tillis has carved a somewhat moderate path for himself over the past decade in office. He has not, like the majority of his colleagues, thrown in entirely with the Trump/MAGA movement.
That unwillingness to fully fall in line has led some to speculate that Tillis could be primaried by a more Trump-friendly candidate. Or that the prospect of just such a challenge could drive Tillis into retirement.
At the moment, no primary challenger has emerged, however. And Tillis insists he is running again.
A Cooper candidacy — particularly if Tillis emerges damaged from a primary or loses to a less-electable Republican — could put the seat very much in play for Democrats. If Cooper takes a pass, newly elected state Attorney General Jeff Jackson or Rep. Wiley Nickel are mentioned as Democratic candidates.
3. Friday AMA!
If it’s Friday, it’s a livestream from me on my YouTube channel! I spent an hour answering all sorts of questions this afternoon. Check it out! And don’t forget to subscribe!
NOTABLE QUOTABLE
“I actually feel for Biden, and he knows that he fucked up. And he wasn’t crooked, he didn’t pursue bad policies, he is the most tolerant, loving, caring, non-prejudiced person you could imagine and this is what he’s faced with. It’s a fucking shame.” — James Carville
ONE GOOD CHART
Even inflation has become partisan. Or at least peoples’ expectations for where inflation will head in the next year.
SONG OF THE DAY
Steven Hyden — as I have said before in this space — is my favorite music critic. Not surprisingly, his year-end “best of” list is epically good. I found a bunch of music on it I didn’t know about before — including “Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot” by Liquid Mike. You can listen to the whole album here.
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Local news deserts do not have much to do with how people vote. Local news outlets did not spend a lot of time on the Presidential race. They are more of the if it bleeds, it leads, sports, weather, along with state and local government business/politics.
As someone who almost has a Master’s degree in Economics (never finished the dissertation due to family responsibilities), I could write a dissertation on the chart about inflation. Tariffs will cause prices of imported goods (avocados, cars, rare earths, crude oil from Canada, etc., etc.) to rise because the companies that import the goods pay the tariffs, and they will pass the cost of the tariffs on to their customers. Mass deportations are likely to cause prices to rise. There will be wage increases in meat packing, hotels and resorts, agribusiness and farmers, just to name a few, in order to attract workers. And don’t kid yourselves: there aren’t millions of people, either native-born or here legally, who are begging to work in meat packing or poultry processing plants, or who want to clean hotel rooms, or who want to pick tomatoes in California’s Central Valley or apples in Washington state. Then, the lack of labor, especially in agribusiness writ large, and that includes farmers, makes the products scarce because there isn’t labor available to process or harvest the products or produce.
As for the price of eggs, don’t expect it to drop after Trump is sworn in. Bird flu, which decimated poultry flocks, will increase again in the spring as wild birds migrate bringing the virus with them. Maybe the chickens can be injected with bleach. 😏