Hayes: ‘One Piece of Data that Haunts Me’ Is the ‘+19’ Point Advantage Trump Got from Voters Who Never Consume Political News

HAYES: “As we inch closer to a new year and a new administration, there are still lots of questions about how the election turned out the way it did, and everyone has their pet reasons. It was inflation, sure. It was Joe Biden’s age also. It was the Democrats doing too much of this or too little of that. But for me, the one piece of data that haunts me is this. Just before the election, the think tank Data for Progress surveyed a month’s worth of poll respondents, that’s more than 1,300 voters, to see how closely they paid attention to political news. This sample group of voters basically matched the overall result of the election, favoring Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by 1%, which is how it turned out. But Data for Progress also singled out respondents who said they consume a great deal of political news. That group of voters broke for Kamala Harris by a 6-point margin. And among voters who said they consume zero political news, None at all, Donald Trump took a 19-point advantage. Conclusion you can draw from that data is that the less attention Americans paid to the news, the likelier they were to be big Trump supporters. And we just entered a new environment in which the news as a distinct entity is kind of crumbling. It’s being replaced by the endless scroll of content, the ambient information environment that people breathe into their lungs the way you breathe both air and pollution at the same time. So now you have people who don’t pay attention to ‘the failing news media,’ as it is called by its critics, but are still getting some clues and information from algorithm-driven social networks about what is happening in our democracy and what the government is doing, what the status quo is, what people are proposing to do about it. And this has produced a situation in which the basic way that people relate to their own self-governance and the information they get about it is about as bad and degraded as I personally have ever seen it. There are a lot of reasons for that. We will be exploring those reasons throughout this special show tonight. One place where this bleak information environment is the most obvious is what used to be called Twitter, now X, the social media site that got bought by far-right billionaire Elon Musk who very clearly intentionally manipulated the platform to become a de facto pro-Trump right-wing propaganda outlet, and he succeeded. Studies by The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and academic organizations have found that the site forced political content on users. That content was almost invariably pro-Trump, pro-Republican and pro-Musk. Musk has also shared or amplified far-right and racist conspiracy theories on the sites, all while accounts from mainstream news outlets and liberal politicians get less engagement and more abuse. And all while Musk, the world’s richest man, called Donald Trump’s co-president by some — in fact, even the president — falsely claims he is a crusader for free speech. Just one example, the most obvious example of this new toxic system of content that bombards us, is a vacuum left by a shrinking and distrusted legacy media.”