Keep Your Wits About You in 2024
A lot of people are looking to the New Year not with a sense of promise but of dread. That’s understandable: the idea that 2024 might be the year Americans vote away their democracy is dreadful to contemplate. And the possibility can’t be wished away. It’s real.
But some of our angst is because the media too often plays to our fears—because fear sells—while downplaying evidence to the contrary.
If you’re a reader of the Washington Monthly, you know that’s not how we operate. Two years ago, Monthly Contributing Writer Robert Shapiro began presenting evidence of what he called the “Biden Boom.” In more than a dozen stories, he revealed an economy far stronger than the one portrayed in the press. When mainstream economists were predicting a recession because that’s what their models were telling them—and journalists were treating their words as oracular—Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce, was looking at real-time data and saying, Not happening.
When reporters got swept up in polling showing a “red wave” in 2022, Washington Monthly Politics Editor Bill Scher looked at the same surveys and history and said, I don’t think so. When pundits wrote panicky stories this year about how House Republicans would push the government into default, Scher scrutinized House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s words and incentives and said, This guy wants to cut a deal.
Washington Monthly writers got these stories right, not because they were clairvoyant but because they did a better job interpreting what the current evidence was saying and not saying. Right now, the polling averages have Joe Biden running slightly behind Donald Trump. But if you’ve been reading Shapiro and political analyst Michael Podhorzer in the Monthly, you know that, historically, presidential polls this far ahead of an election are of little predictive value. And to the extent they mean anything, you know from Scher’s newsletter that Trump and Biden have traded the polling lead five times this year. That’s more than during the last four presidential contests, indicating that the race is close and swing voters still matter.
Many Democrats tell reporters they are apoplectic that the president isn’t out on the stump every day defending his record while Trump is holding rallies trashing it. Meanwhile, the right-wing media is echoing Trump’s attacks—many of them pure lies—even as the mainstream press, whatever liberal bias it might have, simply doesn’t see its job as defending Biden’s policies. These dynamics are almost certainly hurting Biden in the polls.
Another way of saying this, however, is that Biden hasn’t yet started campaigning in earnest. When he does, he’ll have a better story to tell than the one most voters have heard—a story the Washington Monthly carefully detailed in 2023. When The Wall Street Journal and other outlets proclaimed this summer that the loss of a few high-profile court cases meant that the Biden administration’s antitrust agenda was failing, Washington Monthly Editor Will Norris said, Um, no. The administration had racked up some big court wins, too, he noted, and corporate mergers had dropped by 40 percent—evidence that the antitrust effort is just getting started. If he’s smart, Biden will run hard on his antimonopoly record, make the case that it’s already helped reduce inflation—the issue voters seem to care about most—and that if reelected, he’ll bring it down even more.
Look, no one can tell you who will win the presidency in 2024. It’s essential to prepare yourself, intellectually and emotionally, for the worst. But it’s even more important to keep your wits about you and not get spooked by the panic of the herd.
That’s what the Monthly can help you do in 2024.
But to do that, we need your support. Independent media outlets always struggle, a problem made worse by predatory tech monopolies that steal our advertising revenue. You can help. We rely on grants and donations to fund our crackerjack reporters and editors. And because we’re a nonprofit, your donation is tax-deductible.
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Wishing you health and happiness in the new year.
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