Good morning. Has it only been a week since Election Day? It seems much has happened in those seven days. As you certainly know by now, Donald Trump carried all the swing states Tuesday night, earning a decisive win the Electoral College. He ran better almost across the board in Democratic Party strongholds, while flipping the Democrats' demographic assumptions on their head. In a feat envisioned at the outset of this campaign only by the candidate himself, the Donald Trump/J.D. Vance ticket appears to have won the national popular vote as well.
Trump also ran ahead of the GOP down-ticket candidates in most states, with coattails that have given the Republican Party control of the Senate. And though it took a while because of slow vote-counting out West, the GOP has retained its narrow majority in the House of Representatives.
Although I'm not a partisan person, my heart goes out to my many friends in the Democratic Party whose hopes were buoyed the weekend before the election by a much-hyped poll showing Donald Trump three points ahead of Kamala Harris – in Iowa, of all places. They were grievously misled. To use a word that gained currency in the waning hours of this campaign, that poll was garbage. Trump carried Iowa by nearly 220,000 out of about 1.6 million votes cast. His 55.8% of the Iowa vote was significantly larger than in 2016 and 2020, when he also carried the state.
The Iowa Poll, which until now had a good track record, also showed Democratic congressional candidate Christina Bohannan, a liberal law professor, leading incumbent Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks by 16 percentage points. That race is yet to be called, but Miller-Meeks has a narrow lead over Bohannan with about 99% of the votes tallied.
I'm not trying to kick someone when they are down. Every pollster will make a mistake now and then; and despite the protestations I expect to hear from my friend and colleague Sean Trende, polling is social science, yes, but it's also an art form. And art can go awry.
My point in singling out the Iowa Poll is that it is done in concert with the Des Moines Register, a newspaper with a proud tradition and solid reputation that has been hit by the same economic forces that have hollowed out so much of the print media. That necessarily means fewer reporters and editors to actually go out into the community and see first-hand what is happening. The first presidential campaign I covered was in 1984, an assignment that took me and hundreds of other reporters first to Iowa, then New Hampshire, and afterward out into the rest of the country. Along the way, we collectively talked to county and state party chairmen, campaign workers and volunteers, local Democrats and Republicans – and literally tens of thousands of our fellow Americans. It was called "shoe-leather reporting" and we used the polls to supplement those efforts, not as a substitute for them.
The old model wasn't perfect. Nor were the reporters of the day: Well-known journalists famously missed Ronald Reagan's ascendance in 1980 and Gary Hart's near-upending of the Democratic establishment four years later. But I think it offered curious voters a more balanced perspective on the election process than the analytics-dominated (and heavily partisan) model prevalent today. Veteran journalist Brit Hume warned about this in the runup to Election Day this year, which Tom Bevan and Andrew Walworth and I discussed on our radio show.
When I was starting out in the news business, America's most highly respected political writer was the Washington Post's David S. Broder. When he died in the spring of 2011, the New York Times published a gracious obituary – noteworthy because Broder had left the Times for their rival newspaper at a time when that was rare. Veteran Times-man Bruce Weber interviewed Dan Balz, Broder's heir apparent at the Post, for that obit and Dan said something relevant to this discussion about covering politics in the 21st century.
"[Broder] had great faith in voters – not just their collective judgment, but their individual ideas," Balz told Weber. "His view was always that campaigns should not just be about the candidates, but about voters and what they want to happen. He drew sustenance from door-knocking around the country. It's tedious work, physically difficult, but he did it longer and better and more extensively than anybody ever has, and he demonstrated over the years a great sensitivity to what was stirring in the country that people in Washington were slower to pick up on."
What I'm saying is that we apparently need more of that kind of journalism today.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on X @CarlCannon.
