SBSQ #13: October Surprise edition

Is Shohei Ohtani the GOAT? What effect could a hurricane have on the election? And what do I think of the new 538 model?

Welcome to the September edition of Silver Bulletin Subscriber Questions. It’s October, you say? Well, not according to me. The calendar-makers played a nasty little trick: odd-numbered months (January, March, May, July) have 31 days. But then because of frickin’ Augustus Caesar, August got 31 days too and ruined the pattern. September has just 30, which is a shame because it’s a great month: awesome weather, baseball pennant races and the beginning of the end of election campaigns. So by the power invested in me by Janus, I declare today September 31.

Where are we getting the extra day from? Honestly, August is a pretty good option. There’s always a certain Sunday Scaries feeling to those last days in August, prolonging the inevitable end of summer. But I don’t want to piss off Augustus. So on this week’s forthcoming Risky Business episode, Maria and I decided on November instead: November now has 29 days. Who likes late November, the microseason of slush and neverending travel nightmares and everyone in your fantasy football lineup having a questionable tag? November has Election Day and Thanksgiving and that’s plenty — it’s time to wrap it up after that.

We will, however, be returning to a more typical SBSQ format, with a series of five medium-length questions. You can leave questions for next time in the comments below or in the Subscriber Chat. In this month’s edition:

• When did Republicans start hating the media?

• Is Shohei Ohtani the greatest baseball player of all time?

• How might Hurricane Helene affect the race?

• Is Pittsburgh in the Midwest?

• What do you think of the new 538 model?

When did Republicans start hating the media?

Jack Motto asks:

I'm a Trump supporter who loves your content. We do exist!

Which leads to my question. It's safe to say that traditional media is generally hostile to Republicans. But why is that? It's tempting to say it's because Trump is a threat to democracy, but I remember the media being just as hostile to Romney/McCain/Bush when they were politically relevant.

Is there a data way to analyze this and point to exactly how and why the fissure between Republicans and mainstream media first formed?

This is an interesting question because my assumption is generally that the media is quite a bit harsher to Trump than it was to previous Republican nominees — that the press changed a lot, particularly in the first year or two of Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House — and is much less “both-sidesy” than it once was. Thus, certain critiques that might have been right 8 or 12 or 16 years ago are now overdone.

But many Republicans like Jack feel differently — they’ve long felt like the media is biased against Republicans. And yes, there is data on this:

The red line shows Republican trust in mainstream media falling to just 11 percent. You could read it in a couple of different ways. One is as a roughly linear trend, perhaps due to ever-increasing educational polarization. More and more, college graduates vote Democratic and political news coverage is also mostly aimed at college-educated voters, especially the “prestige” media that relies on an audience with a high willingness and ability to pay (a New York Times subscription doesn’t come cheaply). Also, especially with the demise of local print media, most journalists are also college-educated, with a secular, cosmopolitan, coastal worldview. This can sometimes result in hilarious moments, like this weekend when the editor of a liberal magazine took issue with a flight attendant wishing passengers a “blessed” departure, which she took as a sign of “creeping Chrisitan nationalism”.

But there are also a couple of discontinuities in the chart. One, obviously, is with the emergence of Trump in 2016, who weaponized Republican distrust of the mainstream media very effectively in defeating 16 other Republicans to win the nomination that year. The second, a bit more subtle, may reflect the growth of Fox News, which was founded in 1996 but really got up to speed in the 2000 election and the early Bush years.

Fox is partly responsible for the emergence of what I call the Indigo Blob, the fusion of left/progressive media and centrist/nonpartisan media (i.e. neither fully blue nor fully purple — but indigo). If you take a whole bunch of conservative customers out of the ecosystem for “mainstream” journalism, then what’s left is the center and the left. And of course, all of this can be self-reinforcing. If mainstream journalists mostly write for a left-of-center audience, their content will almost increasingly reflect that. And that means conservatives will detect even more bias, sometimes fairly and sometimes not. Meanwhile, the mainstream media has far more critics on the left than when I started writing about politics in 2007.

None of this is great: Americans have always been skeptical of instutions in a way that, say, Europeans aren’t, and that’s part of why I like being an American. But a perpetual decline in trust in not just the media but nearly every other major institution will probably result in a decline in American state capacity.

Is Shohei Ohtani the greatest baseball player of all time?

XG asks:

I'm writing something not about the elections, but about the phenomenon that is Shohei Ohtani. I'd love to talk to an expert (i.e you) about whether he can lay claim to be the greatest of all time, and if not where he sits in the pantheon right now.