Hayes: ‘One Piece of Data that Haunts Me’ Is the ‘+19’ Point Advantage Trump Got from Voters Who Never Consume Political News

EXCERPT:

HAYES: "As we inch closer to a new year and a new administration, there are still lots of questions about how the election turned out the way it did, and everyone has their pet reasons. It was inflation, sure. It was Joe Biden’s age also. It was the Democrats doing too much of this or too little of that. But for me, the one piece of data that haunts me is this. Just before the election, the think tank Data for Progress surveyed a month’s worth of poll respondents, that's more than 1,300 voters, to see how closely they paid attention to political news. This sample group of voters basically matched the overall result of the election, favoring Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by 1%, which is how it turned out. But Data for Progress also singled out respondents who said they consume a great deal of political news. That group of voters broke for Kamala Harris by a 6-point margin. And among voters who said they consume zero political news, none at all, Donald Trump took a 19-point advantage. Conclusion you can draw from that data is that the less attention Americans paid to the news, the likelier they were to be big Trump supporters. And we just entered a new environment in which the news as a distinct entity is kind of crumbling. It's being replaced by the endless scroll of content, the ambient information environment that people breathe into their lungs the way you breathe both air and pollution at the same time.”