The contrived hearings have not only failed to generate an outcry — they’ve created a backlash.
First, we need to qualify everything as derived from polling, which is always suspect. We see a common behavior with polls where, after months of displaying a particular preference from voters, in the weeks approaching an election they suddenly shift sharply. It has become a big enough issue that one of the most respected polling aggregators, Real Clear Politics, is addressing this by ranking pollsters by accuracy.
That said, we are in the correction cycle for polls with the November 8 election date now looming, and they are going to be about as accurate now as hoped for. The result is some dire news, for both the Democrats and for the membership of the January 6 Committee. That contrived kangaroo court has been designed with two primary results in mind: rendering and neutering Donald Trump, and diminishing the Republican Party in an adverse fashion. That second goal is of primary focus for them today, and the indicators appear disastrous.
The J-6C has been eyeing these midterms as a focal point because if they could severely impact the Republican prospects negatively, it would not only rest power with the Democrats for a duration but would also force the hand of the GOP to divest from Trump’s influence. The facts are that the committee has not been at all successful in this mission, and we are getting indicators that they may have in fact provoked an opposite result.
Since its inception in the summer of 2021, the committee has not been influential in any capacity. Before it even formed, the incessant drumbeat from the press of building up the Capitol Riot as the worst threat this country has ever seen was met with skepticism. As news outlets were obsessed with calling January 6 the worst attack this country ever experienced, while placing all of the blame on Trump and the Republicans, that hyperbole repelled people.
AP Photo/ Andrew Harnik, Pool
As the committee was launched, already fewer people were willing to blame the GOP for the riot, and then the contrived formation of the committee by excluding key GOP members inspired more cynicism. As the hearings wore on, the press continued to insist on how deeply trenchant the findings were, all while the public looked at the impotent revelations with mounting apathy. Now as we approach the midterms, the results are even more severe.
Surveys on voter interest show a significant passion to turn out next month. But as far as the motivations go – good luck finding January 6 on the list of priorities. To even find where this topic lands as a priority I had to find this expanded list of issues from the New York Times, and it is deep in the list. But now we see signs that there is more than simply apathy at play. The January 6 Committee has possibly driven people off.
In a clearly dour column at the Washington Post, Aaron Blake finds details that have him bemused. When asked what they considered to be a threat to our democracy, the number of people indicating it is the Republican Party plunged even more from prior surveys, down to 28 percent. But that is not the whole story, by a stretch. This is the sobering detail:
But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see that isn’t the full story: It’s also the case that many Democratic voters haven’t been convinced that the problem goes beyond Trump. That 28 percent figure is actually smaller than the percentage who view the Democratic Party as a threat to democracy (33 percent) — despite there being no comparable example of Democrats trying to overturn an election. (And no, Stacey Abrams and Hillary Clinton aren’t analogous.)
Townhall Media
That is staggering. Nearly two full years of lobbying by the press and then the overlay of the J-6C for more than another year in order to cast the GOP as anti-Constitutional treasonous insurrectionists have instead led to people seeing the Democrats as more of a threat. But it gets better. That two-year Capitol riot filibuster in the press has led to that industry being considered even more of a threat.
More than half of all registered voters see the mainstream media as a threat to American democracy, according to a new poll. 59 percent of voters view the media as a “major threat to democracy,” while 25 percent said the press is a “minor threat” and only 15 percent said it poses no threat.
And there you have it. 85 percent of people see the press as some kind of threat to democracy. All the hysteria we have been served is not being accepted and those pushing the storyline the most appear to be absorbing the bulk of the criticism. Again, these polls cannot be regarded as gospel by any stretch, but once you consider the machinations used – from oversampling to trimming responses in order to alter percentages – which manipulate results at times, for these returns to come back means something significant must be percolating.
Considering one of the last things the media pollsters want is to have the Democrats looking poorly, while the very last thing they want is to have the press regarded like this, for these numbers to actually be reported is highly significant. It may be time to get excited about the November election.