Saturday, 23 November 2024

Did Something Happen, Guys? ABC Uses Election Overnight to Take Loads of Truth Serum

Newsbusters
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CBS News was largely dominated late Tuesday into Wednesday by out-of-touch, elitist tongue lashings toward Trump voters as too stupid to understand how the economy works, ABC News had takes of their own that, surprisingly, grew largely more and more sensible as the night wore on, creating a remarkable turn for a few hours by the network with the horribly biased and hostile newscasts, Good Morning America and World News Tonight.

Jonathan Karl — a three-time anti-Trump author and longtime ABC correspondent — admitted just after a quarter to midnight Eastern that former President Trump was “on the precipice of the greatest comeback in American political history” and something “we haven’t seen” before with anyone rising up after he “left the White House the way he left, impeached for the second time, seven members of his own party voting to convict him in the Senate, facing multiple criminal trials, indictments in four separate cases,” and “convictions in the case in New York.”

Karl astutely hit on the issue that voters showed was most critical to them in picking Trump. Incredibly, he had back-up from chief global affairs anchor Martha Raddatz and World News Tonight anchor David Muir (click “expand”):

KARL: It gets to the question Donald Trump would ask in the closing days at the beginning of every one of his rallies: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? And, as we have seen in our polling, as we’ve seen in the exit polls, today the resounding answer from most Americans is no that — that they feel they have been hit with housing costs that have been brutal. Inflation, inflation — the rate of inflation has gone down, but eggs are still about 161 percent now then they were when — when Joe Biden got in. Gas prices about 50 percent more than when Joe Biden came into the White House. Americans are saying, clearly, I mean — even — even before hearing the final results we see, you know trend lines that they are unhappy with the stewardship of — of the Democrats in the White House and this is — this is a rejection of that.

RADDATZ: And, David, if I can just to double down on that. The message Kamala Harris has been trying to get out there is things are getting better. The inflation rate is going down, but people who have suffered through this, they’ll never get the money back. And voters I talked to, it was the absolute number one issue. And they felt that Donald — that they were thriving under Donald Trump. There was a young voter in Texas, a veteran who did not vote for Donald Trump in 2020, was disgusted by what Donald Trump said. He — his name was Carl Wild and I checked in with Carl Wild this week and he said my business has gone downhill. My wife’s business has gone downhill. I am voting for Donald Trump. He says I’m still disgusted by what he has said, but this is about my family. This is about us suffering the last three or four years. I mean, no matter the explanations how or why it happened. That is what people are feeling. I’ve said it tonight before. That is their truth. They have blanked out some of the things Donald Trump has said. They’ve normalized some of the things Donald Trump has said, but it’s their kitchen table.

MUIR: And when you’re paying more at the grocery store, you know it.

As an example to the contrast we saw from ABC (and, like here and here, on NBC), Muir an chief business and economics correspondent Rebecca Jarvis showed care and validation toward voters feeling economic pain, instead of crudely dismissing them:

ABC had partisan analysts throughout to actually give opinions, including former RNC Chair Reince Priebus, who said at 12:41 a.m. Eastern this election was “not just a reset,” but “a realignment” by “people making a decision. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian in the country” that “were tired of the open border,” “hearing the economy is great you didn’t feel it, and “sanctuary cities” to name a few.

Karl expanded on this a few minutes later with an exit poll statistic that he viewed as a death knell to Harris: “[Y]ou had 45 percent, almost half say that their family’s are worst off. If you combine that with the number who said it was about the same, 70 — over 70 percent said they were either worst off or the same they were four years ago.”

This, Karl illustrated, was made worse by Harris’s “devastating answer” to ABC’s The View that she wouldn’t have done anything differently than Joe Biden in the last four years if he were president.

Muir even voiced his agreement that “it was the answer and” her “pause too because...so much of campaigning...is the visual” and “the interaction...and it was just — in that moment, you knew that is not who the voters feel like the economy is issue number one and some of the other issues” wanted to hear.

Just after 1:00 a.m. Eastern, Karl spelled out a more ominous future, telling views Trump will be “more powerful than he was the first time he ran” given favorable Supreme Court decisions and “the resistance is gone” inside the Republican Party.

Hilariously, Muir and Raddatz were forced to admit the media circus over former Trump chief of staff John Kelly didn’t move the needle left (click “expand”):

MUIR: She had help from Liz Cheney. General John Kelly, who’s not political, came out and talked about what he witnessed in the administration as his first chief of staff. Their campaign was, if you reelect him, he will not have the guardrails. Martha, clearly that argument didn’t resonate with the American people here tonight.

RADDATZ: It clearly didn’t or at least half the country that did not resonate. Felony convictions, the calls our democracy would be over, the John Kelly statements about the military and that former President Trump had said they were suckers and losers, the men and women who had died during wars. All of that. Some of the voters I talked to, in fact one of them who is very strongly for Trump and stronger than he was in 2020, stronger than he was in 2016, I said, do you have any reservations at all January 6? And he said, "Absolutely not! The more you all talk about that, the more Trump voters you will attract. This election was not about that. But in the end, here we are. This is democracy.

ABC senior national correspondent Terry Moran also delivered some reality checks to Democrats. At one point, he showed voters past electoral college maps from elections for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to illustrate how Democrats have “stopped competing in so many different parts of the country, primarily rural areas” and allowed Republicans to run up election-winnable margins.

Later in the same hour, he called this post-election season “a moment of truth for Democrats” since their belief that “demography is destiny” for a permanent governing majority is long gone and they have other questions to ask of themselves:

Longtime Justice correspondent Pierre Thomas weighed in at 2:00 a.m. Eastern, fretting “Trump is about to become the most powerful president in modern history, primarily because of the fact that the Justice Department will be completely at his beck and call” and he’ll likely seek a new FBI director.

ABC was honest with their viewers that their silent Harris vote mirage was a joke, as evidenced by their gasps when one of their in-house pollsters told them how she did with women:

Having denied reality earlier in ABC’s coverage, former Univision anchor Maria Elena Salinas seemed heartbrokenly resigned to the fate of Latinos moving right:

Raddatz was also uneasy with how Trump would try to change the military and remove woke elements:

Following Trump’s victory speech, Karl was effusive in his praise for this “astounding” result, deeming it the “greatest political comeback in the history of American politics” with “nothing else [being] even close”

Having tried to keep hope alive earlier in the night, chief White House correspondent and lead Biden-Harris regime apple polisher Mary Bruce expressed some honesty as the night went on, saying after Trump’s speech that her friends on the Harris campaign had been “notably dark and silence.”

“I just keep thinking about the picture that they had been painting of Donald Trump in the last days and weeks — this really dire picture, you know, calling him unfit and saying he simply doesn’t represent and stand for the ideals of this country. Kamala Harris called Donald Trump a fascist. And she continued to argue over and over again that she could bring the country forward, that the could turn the page. It turns out the country wanted to turn the page. They just wanted to turn the page on Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s administration,” she admitted.

Our Brent Baker got this crazy take from Raddatz as well about regrets with Harris’s campaign:

There was also this interesting series of reflections from Bruce about the Biden presidency, including her admirable admission that not only did Harris fail to adequately say what she’d do differently than Biden, but also what she’d do first if elected president (click “expand”):

I do think a lot about Joe Biden’s legacy. I mean, we talked a little bit about that tonight. There will be a lot of questions about the decisions Joe Biden made, the timing of his decisions. I think he — when decided to step down and step away from the race, he made clear he was doing so and passing the baton so that Kamala Harris could continue to the work, could keep his agenda going forward and finish the job. That was his campaign phrase. Now, instead, the opposite is likely to happen. I mean, Donald Trump has made it pretty clear he’s going to eviscerate much of Joe Biden’s agenda and accomplishments, everything from the Inflation Reduction Act to foreign policy, as we’ve discussed to climate change, and health care policy. We are about to see likely if Trump, you know, and it does certainly seem like that is whether we are headed, that he is once again in the White House, that he’ll reverse and undo a lot of what Joe Biden has done there.

(....)

[I]t was a 107 day split, without a primary, and we did — and I will never forget we witnessed those hours after Joe Biden announced that he was exiting the race to see the party coalesce around her and say, okay, you are doing this, and it came for weeks and even really months, so many in the party had questioned whether Kamala Harris had what it — it really took, if she could do this and the party quick sort of answered that question themselves and said, no we’re doing this and we believe with the best shot. But Joe Biden insisted until the very end — I mean, just a few weeks ago that he still thought he could have won. It was a very bittersweet and difficult decision him. And you do have to wonder if he is thinking and many others in the party are thinking he needed to make that decision a lot sooner.

(....)

I also keeping thinking of, beyond that question of what you would do differently, and I think we all agree it is very hard to cast yourself as the candidate of change when you are the sitting Vice President, but the other question that she kept being asked and that we were still asking when I interviewed her last week was, you know, what is day one — what is that first top priority? And it took her a while to find the right message for that. And I think back to covering Joe Biden’s race, and it was a refrain in every speech. Day one, this is what I’m going to do. On day one, here’s the first thing I’d go, and she got around it to saying, well, it’s going to be this package of economic proposals. I’m going to start with, you know, lowering cost for prescription drugs and bringing down housing costs and bringing down the price of groceries, but it just was a messaging issue. It took her a while to get to the point and it wasn’t break through. And so, I think you combine that with not being able to articulate the clear cut differences from Joe Biden, especially on the economy when people aren’t feeling what you’re saying. Inflation’s coming down, but if it’s not coming down in my wallet, it doesn’t matter. That combination is a hard one to overcome.

By the 5:00 a.m. Eastern hour, Bruce even came out and admitted the Kelly hubbub didn’t work:

Before the ABC crew signed off and after ABC declared Trump the winner, Karl reiterated his belief that Trump’s victory was “unbelievable comeback, the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States” as if he were “rising like a phoenix from the ashes[.]”

To see the relevant transcript from ABC on November 5 and 6 (including even more quotes), click here.


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