I'm in a fairly red county in NJ, and I thought it would be a much closer race. Lots of lawn signs for Jack, very few for Mikie. I got probably 5 or 6 mailers for local Dem candidates, even one for the town Board of Ed, also a couple of those non-partisan "please vote" postcards but not a single mailer from Sherrill. No door to door canvassers either. I did finally get a text message or 2 for Sherrill right before Election Day. So I thought, what the hell is she doing? And we're so close to the NY media market, that she was totally overshadowed by the Mamdani race in the news.
However I never believed that NJ was getting redder, that was a totally wrong conclusion from the 2024 election results. I think what happened is a lot of the "quiet quitters' who didn't vote for Harris because of Gaza or other reasons, came out for Sherrill, in spite of a lackluster campaign and a vanilla candidate.
I started noticing a shift in journalism when reporters started congregating on Twitter. Instead of working a beat, they chatted amongst themselves and formed their perceptions several removes from the actual news subjects.
I understand Bouie (whose writing I admire) writes opinion, not news. But readers absorb his opinion as news-based. He’s a very smart guy. And he delivers analysis, which, as Noah likes to admit for himself, can be wrong! Backfilling a story to fit the data (polls) is just making stuff up. We should hold news writers to a higher standard.
I mean, as I said, people do the best they can! Polls are the story we’ve got., so people try to work with what they’ve got. Just, sometimes it’s wrong, and worth sort of thinking through what that means.
It really helped that what campaigning Sherrill did painted Jack Ciattarelli as the MAGA Candidate, and MAGA is about as popular in my part of New Jersey (Jersey City, which is a New York City suburb, basically) as a new flavor of COVID-19.
I'm in a fairly red county in NJ, and I thought it would be a much closer race. Lots of lawn signs for Jack, very few for Mikie. I got probably 5 or 6 mailers for local Dem candidates, even one for the town Board of Ed, also a couple of those non-partisan "please vote" postcards but not a single mailer from Sherrill. No door to door canvassers either. I did finally get a text message or 2 for Sherrill right before Election Day. So I thought, what the hell is she doing? And we're so close to the NY media market, that she was totally overshadowed by the Mamdani race in the news.
However I never believed that NJ was getting redder, that was a totally wrong conclusion from the 2024 election results. I think what happened is a lot of the "quiet quitters' who didn't vote for Harris because of Gaza or other reasons, came out for Sherrill, in spite of a lackluster campaign and a vanilla candidate.
I started noticing a shift in journalism when reporters started congregating on Twitter. Instead of working a beat, they chatted amongst themselves and formed their perceptions several removes from the actual news subjects.
I understand Bouie (whose writing I admire) writes opinion, not news. But readers absorb his opinion as news-based. He’s a very smart guy. And he delivers analysis, which, as Noah likes to admit for himself, can be wrong! Backfilling a story to fit the data (polls) is just making stuff up. We should hold news writers to a higher standard.
I mean, as I said, people do the best they can! Polls are the story we’ve got., so people try to work with what they’ve got. Just, sometimes it’s wrong, and worth sort of thinking through what that means.
It really helped that what campaigning Sherrill did painted Jack Ciattarelli as the MAGA Candidate, and MAGA is about as popular in my part of New Jersey (Jersey City, which is a New York City suburb, basically) as a new flavor of COVID-19.
I thought Ciattarelli ran a fine campaign it was just the wrong year and he’s reheated leftovers.