Media top headlines January 25
In media news today, Peter Doocy says Biden called his cellphone to ‘clear the air,’ Whoopi Goldberg goes off on Bill Maher for his pandemic comments, and Sarah Palin tests positive for COVID delaying her defamation case against the New York Times.
A New York Times Tuesday guest essay predicted that President Biden could be dragging the Democrats into a "political earthquake" after a poll found that in 2021 more Americans are identifying as Republicans than as Democrats, a first in decades.
There was a great difference in Democrats' popularity in 2021 versus the previous year, which Christopher Caldwell attributes in part to Biden. Gallup found that Republicans outperform Democrats in Americans' party preferences at 47% compared to Democrats' 42%.
"Since Gallup began tallying party identification in 1991, Democrats have averaged a four-point lead," according to Caldwell.
Biden appears to lose popularity apparently synchronously with his party. A January Quinnipiac poll found Biden's approval to be at 33%, with the majority of Americans disappointed in the president's handling of COVID-19, foreign policy, and the economy. The poll reflects historic inflation, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Biden's failure to "shut down the virus" as he promised during his 2020 campaign.
CNN POLITICAL ANALYST ECHOES PRESIDENT BIDEN, COMPARES REPUBLICANS TO SEGREGATIONISTS
Biden (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Caldwell said Biden's widely-panned remarks in Atlanta, which compared those who oppose his election reform agenda to reviled figures in American history, is politically poisonous for the Democrats.
"When … Biden told an Atlanta crowd this month that those who opposed this bill were on the same side as Alabama’s segregationist Governor George Wallace and the Confederacy’s President Jefferson Davis, he was arguably combining the condescension of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 'deplorables' remark with a kind of anti-white race-baiting. That is electorally dangerous," Caldwell wrote.
(Jack Delano/PhotoQuest/Getty Images | Tom Brenner/Getty Images)
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Americans are not buying the story Democrats are selling, according to Caldwell.
"Roughly since the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, Democrats have been telling a story about the country that focuses way too much on race and way too much on Donald Trump," he wrote. "Democrats have been led astray by their Trump obsession. They have misunderstood what the former president represented to voting Americans. ... Trump tapped into smoldering grievances against various information-economy elites and managers. There is no reason that ethnic-minority voters wouldn’t share some of those grievances."
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