Im-Politic: Latest Charlottesville Polls Suggest a U.S. Race Relations Muddle

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ABC News, CBS News, Charlottesville, Confederate monuments, Harris, Harvard University, Huffington Post, Im-Politic, Marist University, Mark Penn, Morning Consult, NPR, Politic, polls, race relations, The Hill, Trump, Washington Post, white nationalists, white supremacists

Keeping in mind how flawed they are, and keeping in mind that the wording of their questions matters a lot, several polls are now in (out?) on the intertwined issues of what to do about the nation’s various (and variegated!) Confederate monuments, and how Americans viewed President Trump’s response to the recent Charlottesville, Virginia “Unite the Right” rally, the counter-protests it attracted, and the violence that resulted – which of course produced the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer. The findings seem pretty clear, if somewhat challenging to explain: Most Americans don’t want the statues etc, removed from public spaces, but at the same time, most Americans disapproved of Mr. Trump’s response to the controversy – which included a defense of keeping the monuments in place.

Huffington Post, a news outlet I rarely cite, just performed a useful service by compiling the results of seven surveys on the Confederate monuments question conducted this month by six organizations. In five of the seven (including the NPR-Marist poll I wrote about last Friday), majorities backed keeping the monuments exactly where they are. In one of the outliers, this position was backed by a big plurality (49 percent).

The only survey showing a widespread desire for change found that by a wide 58 percent to 26 percent margin, respondents supported “relocating monuments honoring the Confederacy from government property and moving them to museums or other historic sites where they can be viewed in proper historical context.” Unless it’s assumed that “proper historical context” would portray the Confederate cause in an overall less-than-flattering light, even this arguably moderate viewpoint doesn’t exactly demonstrate that most Americans view its links to slavery and treason as especially troubling. Which of course I find especially troubling.

It’s possible to explain how these opinions dovetail with the negative reviews drawn by the president’s Charlottesville-related words and deeds, but it’s anything but easy, as I’ll elaborate on in a moment. But first the actual findings.

The earliest survey on the matter yielded results that could be seen as ambiguous. It was the NPR-Marist poll, and it showed that by 51 percent to 31 percent, the public viewed the Trump “response to the violence in Charlottesville” was “not strong enough” (as opposed to being “strong enough). This poll, remember, came out on August 17, and was only asking respondents about the president’s remarks as of Monday, August 14 and Tuesday, August 15 – before his late Tuesday afternoon press conference, when he made much more controversial comments. So it wasn’t entirely clear of whom Mr. Trump should have spoken more “strongly” – if any group or individual.

Subsequent polls, however, have made clear that most Americans believe that the racial issues as well as that Trump performance lay at the heart of their criticisms. The first clue came in a CBS News poll that was released on Thursday, the 17^th. According to the pollsters, a strong majority disapproved of “Trump’s response to Charlottesville” attack and that “Disapproval of the president’s handling of events rose [in interviews conducted] following the [Tuesday] press conference.” Indeed, those interviewed by CBS Tuesday and Wednesday frowned on Mr. Trump’s remarks by a 58 percent to 33 percent margin. The Monday interviewees disapproved by a 52 percent to 35 percent margin.

On August 21, the Washington Post reported that a poll it conducted with ABC News found that that Mr. Trump’s Charlottesville comments earned a failing grade from Americans by a two-to-one ration (56 percent versus 28 percent). And three days later, a survey conducted by Harvard University and the Harris polling firm found that 57 percent of respondents viewed the Trump remarks as a missed opportunity to bring the country together, and 57 percent believed he should do more to promote racial unity. (And in case you’re wondering, 59 percent agreed that the President should be doing more in this respect.)

Moreover a similar Harris finding – that the Trump comments did more to divide the country than to unite it – was supported by data both from the CBS News poll and a separate Politico/Morning Consult survey released on August 23). 

Nevertheless, these polls all presented results that raise important questions as to exactly how their Charlottesville-related views are or aren’t influencing Americans’ views on race relations above and beyond the Confederate monuments controversy.

For example, despite the stated desire both for better race relations and for a greater presidential effort to bring them about, and even though Mr. Trump’s comments on Charlottesville were broadly unpopular, most of the polling evidence shows agreement with the President’s view that both sides deserve equal blame for the violence in that city. (CBS’ was the only poll I found with contrasting results.) Those two sets of views don’t easily jibe with the great dissatisfaction expressed with Mr. Trump’s comments ostensibly because they weren’t racially sensitive enough.

Moreover, fully nine percent of Americans, according to the Post-ABC poll, said that it is “acceptable” to “hold neo-Nazi or white supremacist views.” Another eight percent were undecided. (The NPR-Marist poll, held before the heated Trump press conference, found support for “white supremacist” and “white nationalist” groups at only half these levels.)

The best explanation I’ve found for these apparent inconsistencies comes from Mark Penn, a well known pollster who helps direct the Harvard-Harris operations. Penn centered on that Trump press conference and contended, “His arguing the point about the violence is a Pyrrhic victory as he still gets the blame for the polarization in the country. The voters are looking for a uniter and he is coming off as a divider.”

I fully agree that Mr. Trump’s big post-Charlottesville problem has been being too argumentative (on top of firing off inconsistent comments seemingly from day to day) and that most Americans want a unifier in the White House. Yet the polls and Penn’s observation leave me less convinced that a critical mass of the country agrees on what it wants this unifying message to be, especially when it comes to race issues.

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Im-Politic: Clinton’s Campaign Sure Thinks the Mainstream Media is “With Her”

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2016 election, ABC News, Bernie Sanders, CBS News, CNN, Donald Trump, Establishment Media, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, media, MSNBC, NBC News, NPR, PBS, The Intercept, The New York Times, Washington Post, Wikileaks

The word “surrogate” is defined in dictionaries as “a substitute, especially a person deputizing for another in a specific role or office.” Now thanks to the Wikileaks disclosures of internal emails and other strategy documents from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, we know that the Democratic candidate and her operatives believed that many members of the Mainstream Media fit that description for her upcoming White House race as well.

According to a memo released by Wikileaks on Friday, and first reported (to my knowledge) on The Intercept website, the list of journalists viewed by the Clinton-ites as reliable conveyors of her message included numerous opinion journalists whose liberal leanings are no secret. Examples include E.J. Dionne, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank, and Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post; and David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, and Gail Collins of The New York Times.

There’s nothing wrong in principle with their presence. There’s no evidence so far that any of them offered their services to the campaign either voluntarily or in response to a request. And unless material comes out indicating active collusion, although surely most are bristling at the suggestion that they’ve been in the tank for anyone in politics, none of these pundits has any control over how they’re viewed by politicians.

But the Clinton characterization of other list members is much more troubling. Dan Balz of the Post isn’t exactly a pure-play columnist – presumably that’s why his employer doesn’t place his pieces on the op-ed page. But his “news analyses” are supposed to occupy some middle ground between opinion and hard news. That concept isn’t necessarily illegitimate. But maybe the Post could clue its readers in on how it views the relevant distinctions, so they could make up their own minds as to how to view these articles?

Another category of listees is problematic, too, but maybe a little less so, since Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Mathews host talk shows on a cable network (MSNBC) that doesn’t try very hard to hide its partisanship. (Similar criticisms of course can be leveled at many of their counterparts on Fox News.)  

Major problems, however, surround the inclusion of news show hosts and anchors who do style themselves as objective journalists. For reasons, I described yesterday, no one should be surprised that ABC News Sunday talk show host George Stephanopoulos is viewed as a Clinton surrogate. But his CBS counterpart John Dickerson? Wolf Blitzer of CNN? Charlie Rose, who does double duty at CBS and PBS?

And scariest of all is the number of listed journalists who present themselves as completely objective beat reporters, like Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Jon King and Jeff Zeleny of CNN, Mara Liasson of NPR, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, and Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post. Moreover, in another memo, the New York Times‘ Maggie Haberman was described as an especially “friendly journalist” who has “never disappointed” the Clinton team with her performance after their promptings.

Since this material dates from spring, 2015, it’s of course nothing more than speculation (however plausible) to venture that Clinton’s operatives have viewed these same journalists as trusted allies in the campaign against her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. (He didn’t declare his candidacy until June.) But the timing is revealing nonetheless because by April, Clinton’s main rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, had thrown his hat into the ring, and it was clear by then that many voters in the party’s left wing were recoiling at the prospect of Clinton as liberalism’s standard-bearer.

As a result, these memos add to the case that much of the national press corps has seen its real mission not as reporting events as objectively as possible, or even as fronting for Democrats, but as defending a center-left status quo against populist challengers of all stripes. Certainly Sanders and many of his backers count themselves as victims.

Fortunately, the only silver lining in this picture is a bright one: Americans’ trust in the mass media to give them the straight news dope is at an all-time low, at least according to Gallup. Undoubtedly that’s a big reason why the establishment media’s finances show signs of weakening across the board. If money really does talk in the ranks of these profit-seeking enterprises, mounting business pressures could push them back to their more responsible roots. Or the Mainstream Media’s owners could arrogantly decide to go down with their ships – in which case the big question will be whether investors more devoted to quality journalism will recognize the vacuum they’ve left.