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NYT Claims Millenials Move Right: Cherry-Picking at Its Best [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-06-24
Credit to FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) for this research and analysis. If you needed another reason to cancel your NYT subscription, here it is:
fair.org/…
Here are a few gems from it, hopefully not violating fair use (see what I did there?):
[Nathan Cohn’s] piece was a rebuttal to an article last December by John Burn-Murdoch (Financial Times, 12/30/22), who argued that “Millennials are Shattering the Oldest Rule in Politics.” How? “Generations of voters…are no longer moving to the right as they age.”
That “oldest rule in politics,” as Burn-Murdoch writes, or what Cohn refers to as “political folklore,” is the notion that as people age, they naturally tend to become more conservative.
(. . .)
Cohn’s analysis relied on just two data points: pre-election polls archived at the Roper Center for the 2012 and 2020 presidential elections. Cohn tried to make it seem more elaborate by noting that his analysis relied on “thousands of survey interviews.” That could mean just two polls, or an average of several polls from 2012 and 2020, which would indeed include thousands of respondents. But the limiting factor is that it’s still just two data points. Cohn excluded the 2016 presidential election, and ignored altogether any voting contests other than the two presidential elections. To call it superficial is to be kind.
(. . .)
Two weeks after his millennial article, Cohn (New York Times, 6/14/23) implicitly acknowledged that the folklore he cited earlier didn’t apply to older voters. Some of his readers had asked the obvious question: How did Biden do better in 2020 than Obama in 2012 if all those cohorts of voters under 50 shifted toward the Republican Party in 2020? After all, Biden received 51.3% of the vote to Trump’s 46.8%, a 4.5 point margin. Obama won by 51.1% to 47.2%, a difference of 3.9 points.
Lo and behold, it turns out that one factor explaining Biden’s better performance was antithetical to the conventional wisdom. Cohn explained:
Mr. Biden fared much better than Mr. Obama among voters born before 1960—those who were at least 60 years old in 2020 or 52 in 2012. These cohorts lurched to the left between 2012 and 2016, and yet again between 2016 and 2020.
Lurching to the left is not what that “oldest rule in politics,” or “folklore,” predicts older voters would do. Older people aren’t supposed to lose their brains as they age, and revert to having only a heart.
When I think about myself 10 or 20 years ago, I would say I am more progressive now. Perhaps the NYT thinks I am losing my brain? In any case, if I were a regular reader of the NYT, I would surely be losing my mind.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/24/2177397/-NYT-Claims-Millenials-Move-Right-Cherry-Picking-at-Its-Best
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