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1980 Flashback, Mainstream Media Shocked By Polls vs. Votes

Posted by Bruce Carroll - @GayPatriot at 5:00 pm - November 6, 2012.
Filed under: 2012 Congressional Elections,2012 Presidential Election

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10 Comments

  1. That’s funny, Democrat wins used to be Red. It’s more appropriate, I think. When did they switch?

    Comment by ILoveCapitalism — November 6, 2012 @ 6:02 pm - November 6, 2012

  2. So, Lesley Stahl didn’t *always* look like the Cryptkeeper. Good to know.

    Comment by V the K — November 6, 2012 @ 6:20 pm - November 6, 2012

  3. Traditionally, Red was the color for the challenger, and blue the incumbent. It kinda got fixed to Red=GOP and Blue=Dem during Clinton’s reelection… because the Dems ran fast away from getting pinned with the “red” label yet again.

    Comment by James Beam — November 6, 2012 @ 6:22 pm - November 6, 2012

  4. I’ve heard that red == Republican was chosen for the simple reason that both begin with the same letter. Whether this is apocryphal or a sham is unknown to me.

    Comment by Ignatius — November 6, 2012 @ 7:26 pm - November 6, 2012

  5. Interesting, how Reagan beat Carter by 10 points (traditionally a landslide win) and even CBS showed him up 9 in this clip… and yet, around 2:00, the Ron Burgundy type dismisses Reagan’s vote as “wide, but not deep”.

    Even then, the MSM was making excuses for failed lefties and sneering at their opponents.

    Comment by ILoveCapitalism — November 6, 2012 @ 7:26 pm - November 6, 2012

  6. Dan Rather’s analysis (ending the clip) is the strongest of the bunch. I guess that was before he went insane and start taking packages of fake documents from mysterious women.

    Comment by ILoveCapitalism — November 6, 2012 @ 7:28 pm - November 6, 2012

  7. I demand an apology from the main stream media for the last four years.

    Liberal American is NOT in touch with the rest of the country and they have subjected the majority to abuse for at least a decade! Obama is only one man. He could not have perpetrated such a fraud as this on his own. The media encased the liberal candidate in a bubble, then spread the distorted information as if it was “objective” facts.

    I hope the American people save their anger and direct it not at Barack Obama, but at the media, who is really responsible for ‘Gaslighting’ an entire nation.

    Like freedom of speech and freedom of religion, freedom of the press is a sacred trust that the American people have entrusted to the fourth estate. They are a vital part of any FREE political system and they have let us down!

    Comment by gastorgrab — November 6, 2012 @ 8:07 pm - November 6, 2012

  8. I was 7 in 1980. This is the first time I’ve seen this…

    Comment by Sebastian Shaw — November 6, 2012 @ 8:57 pm - November 6, 2012

  9. Democrat wins used to be Red. It’s more appropriate, I think. When did they switch?

    From Wikipedia:

    “Before the 2000 presidential election, the traditional color coding scheme was “Blue for Republican, Red for Democrat,”[2] in line with historical European associations (red was used for left-leaning parties).[3] Traditional political mapmakers, at least throughout the 20th century, have used blue to represent the modern-day Republicans, and the Federalists who preceded them. Perhaps this was a holdover from the days of the Civil War when the predominantly Republican North was “Blue”.[4] Even earlier, in the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison used maps that coded blue for the Republicans, the color Cleveland perceived to represent the Union and “Lincoln’s Party”, and red for the Democrats.[5] The parties themselves had no official colors, with candidates variously using either or both of the national color palette of red and blue (white being unsuitable for printed materials). Time magazine assigned red to the Democrats and blue to the Republicans in its election graphics in every election from 1988 to 2000. The Washington Post’s election graphics for the 2000 election were Republican-blue, Democrat-red.[3]

    “… In the days following the 2000 election, whose outcome was unclear for some time after election day, major media outlets began conforming to the same color scheme because the electoral map was continually in view, and conformity made for easy and instant viewer comprehension. On Election Night that year, there was no coordinated effort to code Democratic states blue and Republican states red; the association gradually emerged. Partly as a result of this eventual and near-universal color-coding, the terms “red states” and “blue states” entered popular usage in the weeks following the 2000 presidential election.

    Comment by Vince Smetana — November 6, 2012 @ 9:08 pm - November 6, 2012

  10. In answer to the red/blue switch question: 2000. Prior to that, blue had always been the conservative color, red the leftist color. For a while, TV stations alternated them for reasons I don’t know and after the election of 2000, when America got a refresher on the Electoral College and its function, the apparently random red/blue reversal of that year’s media stuck.

    Comment by Serena — November 6, 2012 @ 9:08 pm - November 6, 2012

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