Trump’s 33% Loss Goes Unreported, the Focus Is On Biden’s Uncommitted 13% In Michigan

Is it not completely obvious to everybody that the mainstream media is setting Donald Trump up to claim another stolen election? Or, is that the idea? Every time you turn around, the likes of Kristen Welker is declaiming how Trump has “trounced” and “decimated” his favorite victim, Nikki Haley, or how he’s leading Joe Biden in the polls and that is simply not the case at all. For reasons known only to MSM editors, the way the 2024 election is being reported and the actual figures are very different. Much has been made about Joe Biden’s “uncommitted” 13% in the Michigan primary, like that was a death knell, but what about the bludgeoning that Trump took, with a figure almost three times that size? Why is this swept under the rug — or minimized, at the very least?

Trump is much weaker than everyone thinks. The numbers from the Michigan primary show 3 out of every 10 Republican voters are never ever going to vote for Donald Trump, and that's the real story. @JeffTimmer breaks it down on @MSNBC. pic.twitter.com/IuJtvuyllp

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) March 3, 2024

What coverage did that get? But Joe Biden’s 13% uncommitted? OMG, the walls are a tumbling down. This is Biblical, to hear the MSM tell it.

The Washington Post highlighted the “unexpectedly large number of ‘uncommitted’ votes in Michigan’s Democratic primary.” The online headline in The Wall Street Journal likened the Gaza protest to Nikki Haley’s vote total: “Michigan Wins Carry Warning Signs for Biden and Trump.” With a voice-of-doom tone, the online CNN analysis of the Michigan primary posited that Biden “faces a battle for his own coalition and political base that he must win if he is to defeat … Donald Trump.” And Politico’s morning Playbook embraced a historical comparison as it noted that the 2024 support for “uncommitted” was, in raw numbers, “roughly five times the protest vote that Barack Obama saw in the state in 2012 when 10% of Democrats opted against choosing a candidate.”

It all seems devastating for Biden until you look at the details.

For starters, the comparison with Obama is bogus. The 2012 Michigan primary in late February violated the national Democratic Party’s scheduling rules—and didn’t count. Turnout was depressed since the actual delegates were selected in a May caucus.

Nikki Haley received roughly three times as many votes as the Democrats’ “uncommitted” protest. Undermining the Journal’s attempt at false equivalence, Haley demonstrated for the third primary in a row that Trump faces serious problems with affluent, college-educated Republicans. […]

A strong case can be made that the Michigan Democratic primary was a minor blip that will be easily forgotten in November. Of course, Biden may have erred politically by being circumspect, until recently, in his criticisms of Israel’s brutal invasion of Gaza. Biden’s unfortunate calculus may have been that if he held his tongue publicly, he would have more private influence with Netanyahu. But if Biden’s current optimistic talk about a cease-fire for Ramadan (and maybe beyond) proves prescient, some of the Democratic anger and tensions surrounding Gaza will begin to lessen.

The truth is that voting “uncommitted” was about the most painless protest gesture possible. No one was boosting a rival candidate to Biden (the once overhyped Dean Phillips actually managed to finish behind Marianne Williamson in Michigan), nor did anyone have to live with the lasting consequences of their vote. It was as close to a freebie as you ever get in politics, but still only one in eight Michigan voters chose that option.

Yes, according to an analysis by the Detroit News, “uncommitted” beat Biden in three small Wayne County cities that are home to large numbers of Arab Americans: Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, and Hamtramck. But these are places to which political reporters have been flocking ever since Israel invaded Gaza following the brutal October 7 attacks by Hamas: The anger in these communities, though palpable, has been well recorded in the press for months.

For all the talk about the youth vote abandoning Biden, “uncommitted” only received 21 percent of the vote in Ann Arbor (home of the University of Michigan). That’s akin to “uncommitted” badly losing the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn. Yes, the University of Michigan is on spring break, but if students were truly motivated to send a message to Biden, they would have taken advantage of early voting that began while classes were still in session.

In their determination to follow the newest shiny object like the Michigan primary, political reporters often forget that it is still a long way to November. Biden will have committed political malpractice if he has not drummed into the heads of wavering Democrats by the fall that the 2024 election is a choice between him and Trump. For all the public insensitivity that Biden may have displayed about Gaza, does anyone expect Trump to offer a kinder, gentler alternative to appeal to Muslim voters? Unlike a primary where the only alternative is a phantom known as “uncommitted,” an actual election is a choice. And history has shown that it is much easier to cast a protest vote in February than in November with so much on the line.

There would not be this fundamental distrust of the media if there was simple reporting of facts in context, which is what journalism is supposed to be about. But there is this entrenched idea that political reporting has to be done in horserace fashion. Somebody cobbled together that model years back and the MSM just can’t quit it. They have to package the information in “my hair is on fire and the sky is falling terms” rather than to report what is actually taking place in enough depth and context to where it all becomes plain. It’s an insult to the intelligence of viewers, is what it is, since broadcast journalism does the horserace model more than anybody else — although we’re not forgetting for a minute all the column inches the New York Times devoted to Hillary’s emails in 2016.

Trump reigns supreme amongst his MAGA die hard base. Nobody disputes that. But there are not enough of them to where he can win on that alone. And Trump is making zero effort to convert or win over anybody. As a matter of fact, he goes out of his way to alienate people. Remember last month when he said that anybody who contributes to or supports Nikki Haley is not welcome in MAGA? It now remains to be seen if Haley endorses Trump and tries to persuade those voters to go over to Trump’s side, or what exactly she does. Again, a candidate hanging in this long, with these kinds of numbers, is a case of first impression. Nobody expected to see Haley do this, until she did it, and nobody knows the outcome.

Trump is suffering from dementia and on a suicide mission of self-destruction. No normal person has the legal problems that he does, all of his own creation. Yet this is all normalized. We just accept it. And the horserace is on. No wonder we will wonder on a daily basis if we’re losing our minds.