Few things illustrate the disconnect between voters and the news media more clearly than the latter’s long track record of endorsing losers.
Newspapers can say all they want about why a certain candidate is the best choice for America, but voters tend not to care all that much for the recommendations. In fact, in recent years, voters seem to be choosing candidates almost in spite of what editors say they should do.
In the 2020 Democratic primary, for example, reporters and pundits made a big deal of media outlets endorsing Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.
On Jan. 19, the senators were announced as the co-winners of a highly anticipated and highly publicized endorsement from the New York Times.
Warren later won the inexplicably coveted Des Moines Register endorsement ahead of the Iowa caucuses. She also won the Boston Globe’s endorsement ahead of Super Tuesday. Klobuchar, for her part, won the New Hampshire Union Leader’s endorsement ahead of the New Hampshire primary, as well as the endorsements of Las Vegas Weekly and the Las Vegas Sun ahead of the Nevada caucuses.
Warren came in third place in Iowa, making her the eighth Des Moines Register-backed candidate to lose the state’s caucuses since the paper began endorsing primary campaigns in 1988 (it is now four for 12 in supporting winning candidacies). Warren also placed third in her home state of Massachusetts on Super Tuesday. Klobuchar, meanwhile, came in fifth place in Iowa, third place in New Hampshire, and sixth place in Nevada.
Former Mayors Pete Buttigieg and Michael Bloomberg also won media endorsements, as did Andrew Yang and even Bill Weld. Bloomberg’s campaign did not last past Super Tuesday. Buttigieg’s campaign did not even make it to Super Tuesday.
On March 2, Klobuchar ended her campaign. The Minnesota senator won exactly seven delegates. Warren is still in the race despite that she has no path whatsoever to the nomination and despite the fact that she also lost her birth state of Oklahoma on Super Tuesday.
Klobuchar’s failure alone seems like an indictment of the supposed power of news media endorsements. But the thing that really drives that point home is Warren’s total failure as a presidential candidate. She was the chosen one, the darling of the media. From MSNBC to the Washington Post, no 2020 Democratic candidate has received softer, friendlier coverage than Warren. Media have run defense for her. They have excused or downplayed her shortcomings as a candidate. They have ignored outright her falsehoods and fabrications. And that is on top of the fact that they have implicitly endorsed her campaign with constant praise and approving coverage.
Yet, for all of that, Warren is polling in third place and has only 36 delegates to her name. That says as much about the newsrooms that have propped up her campaign as it says about the senator herself.
One takeaway here could be that, contrary to popular belief, the news media are not all-powerful in deciding elections. The press has power, sure, especially when it comes to the power to cover up unflattering or scandalous stories. But media praise and endorsements alone do not seem to do a whole lot to move the needle. The candidates themselves still need to provide an exciting and intelligible message.
Warren is certainly not the first candidate to find out the hard way that a pliant and friendly news media are not enough to deliver electoral victory (see: Wendy Davis, Beto O’Rourke, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Pete Buttigieg). She certainly won’t be the last.
