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Remember the outrage when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sent 50 Venezuelan asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard? Apparently Florida Hispanics, many of whom arrived as asylum seekers themselves, aren’t feeling it.
A recent Telemundo/LX News poll finds DeSantis with a seven-point lead over Representative Charlie Crist, and the same margin approves of his relocation of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. Perhaps even more interesting, while Florida Latinos born in the United States back the decision by four points, Florida immigrants support the move by 11 points and independents by 18 points.
DeSantis’s relocation scheme has inspired lawsuits, calls for a Department of Justice investigation, and pearl-clutching indignation in newsrooms across the country. Yet, surprise, surprise: almost none of the publications that were so deeply troubled by the DeSantis “stunt” reported on the Telemundo poll. Among national news outlets, only NBC News covered it. This can’t be because DeSantis isn’t newsworthy — his every move is covered extensively in the national media — or because the poll was an outlier. The Telemundo results tracked with a national Politico/Morning Consult poll released in September, also largely ignored by the mainstream media, in which Latinos backed Republican governors sending migrants to liberal states by a six-point spread.
Once upon a time, news outlets reveled in reporting that was surprising and counterintuitive. Now the point of our partisan media is to reinforce what we already think, even if it’s wrong. This is how incorrect assumptions like the idea that Hispanics prefer the Democrats’ open border policies become entrenched.
It’s also a big reason why trust in our media is at or near all-time lows. Gallup’s recent trust in media poll found that 14 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of independents have a fair or great deal of trust in the media. Perhaps even more interesting is a recent, little-noticed New York Times/Siena University poll that asked registered voters if they considered a number of politicians and institutions a threat to democracy: 85 percent of registered voters said the mainstream media is a major or minor threat. By comparison, Donald Trump was at 67 percent, the Electoral College came in at 62 percent, and the Supreme Court was at 61 percent.
Voters are clearly getting carried away in considering everything but double-stuffed Oreos a threat to democracy. Yet that being said, these are disastrous votes of no confidence in our country’s press. They should cause a reckoning, or at least some soul-searching and layoffs at major news outlets.
Imagine if you were the CEO of H&R Block, and your company’s internal research showed that blacks and Latinos didn’t trust your company to do their tax returns. You’d surely form a team to figure out why and then do everything in your power to regain the trust of customers in those demographics. No such thing is happening with the mainstream media. Clearly, the liberal blue-check types aren’t going to turn on themselves or suddenly become non-partisan. They’re certain that they’re telling the truth, which Republicans and most independents are just too dumb to grasp. And the suits aren’t overruling the newsroom because they’ve found a way to make hyper-partisan media profitable (or at least some have). All of which means I’m not holding my breath for these dynamics to change anytime soon.
This lefty media bias is leading Democrats into disastrous policy decisions, starting with their lax approach to immigration enforcement. Democratic policymakers are poorly informed because they rely too heavily on media elites who are clueless enough to think that Hispanics support open borders.
Ruy Teixeira, a Democrat who is the co-editor of the worth-reading Substack newsletter Liberal Patriot, nailed it recently when he detailed how woke Democrats are losing the Hispanic vote because they fail to recognize that Hispanics are “normie voters.” Normie voters want secure borders and aren’t losing sleep over Republican governors sending migrants into sanctuary cities and liberal enclaves that profess to want more diversity. But the Democrats are too far estranged from the interests and sensibilities of normie voters to understand this.
When the Democrats lose power on Tuesday, pundits will attribute the loss to the economy, but that will only be part of the story. They’ll keep losing until their policies become more Main Street than MSNBC and Martha’s Vineyard.
