The battle for the White House isn’t over but it’s not too soon to make observations about what the media completely got wrong. Among them is misjudging support for President Trump among non-white voters, Fox News's Tucker Carlson explained.
“Elections tell you what the parties actually look like, not what you imagine they look like … so the coalitions become really clear. And in Florida, the population center, of course, Miami-Dade County, the biggest county in the state, Hillary Clinton [got] 334,000 votes there. An hour ago, with 84 percent reporting, Donald Trump had already outstripped that by more than 100,000 votes,” Carlson said on Tuesday evening.
Miami-Dade is 70 percent Hispanic," he continued. "That’s not what you would have expected if you’ve been watching for the past six months this attempt to racialize everything to make Trump the greatest racist in the world’s history. Whether you buy that or not, you would expect that to depress the votes for Trump in Miami-Dade County but the opposite happened. He’s doing better there with non-White voters than he did four years ago.”
Clearly, the media was completely wrong, he concluded.
“At some point we, the media, need to pause and ask ourselves serious questions about how we’re thinking through what’s going to happen and how we present it," Carlson said, "because our predictions affect outcomes, to some extent, and they also, of course, determine our credibility. People judge us based on our predictions. Something really went wrong in the way we predicted a number of these races.”
He said the media's credibility is "moving toward...zero."
"We have a huge problem in our business with being cut off from the country we cover," Carlson said.
Tucker Carlson: “Media has lost trust and credibility.” pic.twitter.com/zElzmb6Nnh
— TV News HQ (@TVNewsHQ) November 4, 2020