How President Trump helped the media lose the 2018 midterm elections

Historically, leading up to Election Day, media coverage tends to follow the polls: when one party is doing better with voters, the media’s tone tends to be more favorable towards them. But in a new analysis of news coverage of midterm elections since 2002, Stuart Soroka finds that the 2018 midterms were a different story. If the midterms had followed previous trends, he argues, then the media’s negative tone towards the Democrats would have pointed to as much as a four percent drop in the party’s vote share. He writes that this coverage, even in the face of the party’s much-anticipated midterm victories, may be a consequence of media attentiveness to President Trump’s negative rhetoric about his opposition.