The Post-Clinton Era Begins: Tied in Iowa, Down 40%+ in Recent States

We are so surrounded by MSM narratives that it can be hard to escape them, even for the candidates themselves. Here are three signs that we have entered a new era of American politics and why that doesn't bode well for another Clinton White house.

1. The Polls are Now Consistently Wrong

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/03/hillary-clinton-michigan-loss



Polls are the way old campaigns tweak their message and ad buys. They rely on polling to tell them when a state is "in play" and when they can safely move on to the next battle state. Without accurate polling it gets much harder to tell people what they want to hear. The more calculated a campaign, the more handicapping the lack of accurate poll data is.

Polls also show people moving quickly in their preferences in this Primary season. Part of what made the polls miss in Michigan and elsewhere was the speed at which people changed their preferences. When TV was dominant the narrative was more consistent and influential but...

2. Influence of Old Media Has Waned Significantly

The same MSM that stopped Howard Dean and John Kerry, can't seem to stop Bernie Sanders. They have ignored, baited, lied about, hidden and still work every day to tell his supporters they can't win and yet Sanders won with 40%+ margins in the 5 of the last 6 states. Audiences for cable news continued to shrink but shrinking even faster is the reach of cable news. Younger American watch almost none at all. The slow death of big brands is the corporate equivalent of what is happening in the political world. Brand is dead. TV ads and TV sports are the life's blood of big brands and since the last Dem primaries we have a whole new set of Twenty-somethings. If the Sanders/Clinton primaries are any indication then these new voters are nearly unreachable by money spent on TV. Add to that, the media they do pay attention to is not one-to-many and not conducive to the kind of mass hypnosis that tells TV watchers what to expect.

While the trend is strongest with younger people, it is now a big enough trend to show up in the averages that include all ages.



http://www.people-press.org/2012/09/27/section-1-watching-reading-and-listening-to-the-news-3/


3. The Age of Transparency is Coming to Politics

Due to news aggregation and instant crowd-sourced fact checking, the news world is no longer a monolith. It used to be said that "A lie can get half way around the world before the Truth can gets it's shoes on" but now it seems the Truth just posts a link to Snopes and goes back to bed.

Politicians and others who are inconsistent in their message and stances are doomed to be outed as shape shifters. Words still count but only if they line up with actions. Consistency is King as we are increasingly defined by what it says about us online. Retractions, explanations and corrections don't erase the first versions. Desperate attacks remain online forever. If politics is truly a war won by the side that makes the fewest mistakes then those mistakes now include prior mistakes, mistakes made before the current war even started.

It has been 20 years since a Clinton won the White House and 24 years since they won a nomination. The world has changed.