Why did the MSM decree a vibe shift after the 2024 Election?
There is an interesting discussion on this topic in light of the fact that Trump's poll numbers have collapsed and his party is about to take a historical beating in the midterms:
My thesis (and it is not mutually exclusive with the ones offered by others) is that most political journalists like to cover their subject as a soap opera. Jon Chait's way of describing this coverage is with the analogy of a horse race and that's just as good. These journalists SUCK at using structural causes as an explanation. It's way more fun to give total agency to the people they cover (especially Democrats since Republicans' sociopathy is treated like the weather) and gossip about the mistakes they made (which is an inherently subjective exercise). They HATE structural explanations because they don't pack the same drama. It's way more fun to write about how Kamala lost because the Democrats were paying for the sins of being Woke than it is to say that inflation was a worldwide phenomenon coming out of COVID and that made the electorates around the Western democracies really mad at incumbents. Thus, you have bullshit explanations about a vibe shift rather than the sensible explanation that Trump won because of inflation and now he will suffer because he will be blamed for its persistence, especially when he makes it worse by imposing tariffs, deporting workers, and starting a war with Iran.
The corollary here is that historians are better at assessing the causes and implications of political events because they (or at least the good ones) are trained to give weight to structural causes.
Theory: It's just that they are all still on Twitter, and they credulously mistook Musk's manipulation of the algorithm as the manifestation of a genuine cultural change.
— Rob Tracinski (@tracinski.bsky.social) September 23, 2026 at 9:59 AM
Maybe it's not any more complicated than that.
My thesis (and it is not mutually exclusive with the ones offered by others) is that most political journalists like to cover their subject as a soap opera. Jon Chait's way of describing this coverage is with the analogy of a horse race and that's just as good. These journalists SUCK at using structural causes as an explanation. It's way more fun to give total agency to the people they cover (especially Democrats since Republicans' sociopathy is treated like the weather) and gossip about the mistakes they made (which is an inherently subjective exercise). They HATE structural explanations because they don't pack the same drama. It's way more fun to write about how Kamala lost because the Democrats were paying for the sins of being Woke than it is to say that inflation was a worldwide phenomenon coming out of COVID and that made the electorates around the Western democracies really mad at incumbents. Thus, you have bullshit explanations about a vibe shift rather than the sensible explanation that Trump won because of inflation and now he will suffer because he will be blamed for its persistence, especially when he makes it worse by imposing tariffs, deporting workers, and starting a war with Iran.
The corollary here is that historians are better at assessing the causes and implications of political events because they (or at least the good ones) are trained to give weight to structural causes.
Thread:
- Why did the MSM decree a vibe shift after the 2024 Election?