Tiffany Terrell
October 25, 2022
Michael Moore (MSNBC)
During the 2016 presidential election, liberal filmmaker/activist Michael Moore had a prediction that Democratic strategists didn’t like one bit. Moore predicted that New York City real estate mogul turned far-right politician Donald Trump would defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, winning Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — a prediction that proved to be spot on.
Now, in the 2022 midterms, Moore has a prediction that flies in the face of what many pundits have been predicting: He believes that voters, furious because the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, will bring about a massive blue “tsunami.”
Watch a clip below:
'Mike’s Midterm Tsunami Truth': Michael Moore dives into his predictions for 2022 midterms | RawStory.TV
During an interview with The Guardian published on October 23, the 68-year-old Moore — famous for documentaries that include 1989’s “Roger and Me,” 2002’s “Bowling for Columbine,” 2004’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and 2007’s “Sicko” — didn’t back down from his prediction. In fact, he doubled down on it.
Moore believes that liberals and progressives can be conditioned to passively expect the worst when it comes to elections — including the 2022 midterms.
Moore told The Guardian, “The effect of this kind of reporting can be jarring — it can get inside the average American’s head and scramble it. You can start to feel deflated. You want to quit. You start believing that we liberals are a bunch of losers. And by thinking of ourselves this way, if you’re not careful, you begin to manifest the old narrative into existence.”
The activist/filmmaker has addressed a variety of important issues over the years, from the outsourcing of American jobs in “Roger and Me” to the horrors of the U.S. health care system in “Sicko” — which was released three years before the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, was passed by Congress and signed into law by then-President Barack Obama. Now, in 2022, Moore is predicting that the 2022 midterms will become “Roevember” when millions of voters express their anger over Roe v. Wade being overturned with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Care ruling.
Moore told The Guardian, “If I said to you six months ago, ‘You know Kansas, right? It’s a huge pro-abortion state, and this summer, by a margin of 60 percent, they’re going to keep abortion legal,’ you’d think I had made a crazy statement. If I’d told you at the same time that in the congressional election in Alaska, a hard red state, that it’s not only not going to be won by a Democrat, but a Native Alaskan Democrat, again you’d have to question if I was out of my mind…. I’m 68, and I don’t have time to mess around. I’m deadly serious."
Despite a prediction of a blue wave in 2022, Moore was critical of the Democratic Party during his interview with The Guardian. Moore, who has been discussing the midterms in his series of articles for his website/blog he calls “Mike’s Midterm Tsunami Truth,” believes that millions of Americans will be voting Democratic in November not because of Democratic Party organizers and strategists, but in spite of them.
Moore told The Guardian, “The biggest hurdle to what I’m doing with the series is the Democratic Party…. It’s very disheartening, and it would make even me question how we’re going to pull this off. The Democratic Party consultants are feeding lines that are so lame and weak. They don’t go for the jugular like a Republican would. It doesn’t inspire people at home…. We stand here on the precipice of a very important election, and our greatest enemy could be the Democratic Party itself…. Everyone…. who does care, and feels like our democracy could be hanging on by a thread…. has to do something in these last three weeks”.
Moore believes that liberals and progressives can be conditioned to passively expect the worst when it comes to elections — including the 2022 midterms.
Moore told The Guardian, “The effect of this kind of reporting can be jarring — it can get inside the average American’s head and scramble it. You can start to feel deflated. You want to quit. You start believing that we liberals are a bunch of losers. And by thinking of ourselves this way, if you’re not careful, you begin to manifest the old narrative into existence.”
The activist/filmmaker has addressed a variety of important issues over the years, from the outsourcing of American jobs in “Roger and Me” to the horrors of the U.S. health care system in “Sicko” — which was released three years before the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, was passed by Congress and signed into law by then-President Barack Obama. Now, in 2022, Moore is predicting that the 2022 midterms will become “Roevember” when millions of voters express their anger over Roe v. Wade being overturned with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Care ruling.
Moore told The Guardian, “If I said to you six months ago, ‘You know Kansas, right? It’s a huge pro-abortion state, and this summer, by a margin of 60 percent, they’re going to keep abortion legal,’ you’d think I had made a crazy statement. If I’d told you at the same time that in the congressional election in Alaska, a hard red state, that it’s not only not going to be won by a Democrat, but a Native Alaskan Democrat, again you’d have to question if I was out of my mind…. I’m 68, and I don’t have time to mess around. I’m deadly serious."
Despite a prediction of a blue wave in 2022, Moore was critical of the Democratic Party during his interview with The Guardian. Moore, who has been discussing the midterms in his series of articles for his website/blog he calls “Mike’s Midterm Tsunami Truth,” believes that millions of Americans will be voting Democratic in November not because of Democratic Party organizers and strategists, but in spite of them.
Moore told The Guardian, “The biggest hurdle to what I’m doing with the series is the Democratic Party…. It’s very disheartening, and it would make even me question how we’re going to pull this off. The Democratic Party consultants are feeding lines that are so lame and weak. They don’t go for the jugular like a Republican would. It doesn’t inspire people at home…. We stand here on the precipice of a very important election, and our greatest enemy could be the Democratic Party itself…. Everyone…. who does care, and feels like our democracy could be hanging on by a thread…. has to do something in these last three weeks”.
Michael Moore predicting blue ‘tsunami’ response to Roe ruling
Julia Mueller - Yesterday - THE HILL
Filmmaker and activist Michael Moore is forecasting Democrats to keep control of Congress with a blue “tsunami” in this year’s midterms.
Michael Moore predicting blue ‘tsunami’ in response to Roe ruling© Provided by The Hill
With Election Day just two weeks away, Moore — who accurately predicted former President Trump’s 2016 win in the face of many pollsters who said otherwise — is anticipating a Democratic wave following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade.
“On November 8th, 2022, an unprecedented tsunami of voters will descend upon the polls en masse — and nonviolently, legally, and without mercy remove every last stinking traitor to our Democracy,” reads the intro to Moore’s “Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth” Substack.
The Oscar-winning documentarian calls his daily report a “series to counter the reporting that the Republicans are going to win the House and Senate. They are not.”
Last month, Moore emphatically predicted a “massive turnout of women” in the midterms in the wake of Roe’s fall.
Moore cautioned against the popular presumption that a sitting president’s party always fares poorly in an off-year midterm election, which can “get inside the average American’s head,” he wrote in a recent update.
“20 days til #Roevember & the media is busy pushing the old narrative that the Dems will lose. Don’t believe it. They’re so focused on predicting the odds, they’ve lost sight of the issues—where the majority is on our side,” Moore said on Twitter.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, Moore cited a handful of recent instances in which conventional political narratives didn’t play out, including new Alaska Rep. Mary Sattler Peltola (D), who beat out Republican candidate Sarah Palin to become the first Alaska Native in Congress.
“If I’d told you [six months ago] that in the congressional election in Alaska, a hard red state, that it’s not only going to be won by a Democrat but a Native Alaskan Democrat, again you’d have to question if I was out of my mind,” Moore told The Guardian.
“If you’d just been paying attention in the last six months to Kansas, Idaho and Alaska you’d have seen the red flags going up,” he added.
Julia Mueller - Yesterday - THE HILL
Filmmaker and activist Michael Moore is forecasting Democrats to keep control of Congress with a blue “tsunami” in this year’s midterms.
Michael Moore predicting blue ‘tsunami’ in response to Roe ruling© Provided by The Hill
With Election Day just two weeks away, Moore — who accurately predicted former President Trump’s 2016 win in the face of many pollsters who said otherwise — is anticipating a Democratic wave following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade.
“On November 8th, 2022, an unprecedented tsunami of voters will descend upon the polls en masse — and nonviolently, legally, and without mercy remove every last stinking traitor to our Democracy,” reads the intro to Moore’s “Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth” Substack.
The Oscar-winning documentarian calls his daily report a “series to counter the reporting that the Republicans are going to win the House and Senate. They are not.”
Last month, Moore emphatically predicted a “massive turnout of women” in the midterms in the wake of Roe’s fall.
Moore cautioned against the popular presumption that a sitting president’s party always fares poorly in an off-year midterm election, which can “get inside the average American’s head,” he wrote in a recent update.
“20 days til #Roevember & the media is busy pushing the old narrative that the Dems will lose. Don’t believe it. They’re so focused on predicting the odds, they’ve lost sight of the issues—where the majority is on our side,” Moore said on Twitter.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, Moore cited a handful of recent instances in which conventional political narratives didn’t play out, including new Alaska Rep. Mary Sattler Peltola (D), who beat out Republican candidate Sarah Palin to become the first Alaska Native in Congress.
“If I’d told you [six months ago] that in the congressional election in Alaska, a hard red state, that it’s not only going to be won by a Democrat but a Native Alaskan Democrat, again you’d have to question if I was out of my mind,” Moore told The Guardian.
“If you’d just been paying attention in the last six months to Kansas, Idaho and Alaska you’d have seen the red flags going up,” he added.
"MIKE'S MIDTERM TSUNAMI OF TRUTH" CAMPAIGN
Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth #14
If the Mainstream Media Thinks There’s a Chance We May Be Right about Roevember, Watch Out.
Michael Moore
Oct 11
(A daily series to counter the myth that the Republicans are going to win the House and Senate)
Just 24 hours ago, the award-winning online magazine Salon, became the first nationwide media outlet to tell the world about our Midterm Tsunami of Truth.
The result? Soon the stale, tired media narrative about how “the party in power always loses miserably in the Midterms!” will be put out to pasture in OK Boomerville.
All it takes is one little crack in the journalism dam that blocks fresh thinking…
Read the Salon analysis below, and get ready —
Four weeks from TODAY, MAGA is about to get the whoopin’ of their lives.
By Sophia A. McClennen
October 10, 2022
Remember when everyone thought Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election? No, I don't just mean win the popular vote: Win it all and win big. FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's political projection site, had Clinton's chances of winning at 71.4 percent. Frank Luntz tweeted on Election Day, Nov. 8, 2016, "Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States." One GOP insider declared that for Trump to win, "it would take video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of 'Death to America.'" Pundit after pundit, on the left and the right, joined the chorus of mainstream news outlets to declare that the election was Clinton's.
There was, however, one lone voice of dissent: Michael Moore. In July 2016, Moore wrote "Five Reasons Trump Will Be President." That article mostly went unnoticed by mainstream media after the election, when everyone finally realized Moore was right but it was way too late to make a difference.
Fast forward to the 2022 midterms and we find ourselves in a similar scenario, but turned upside down. Now the media is basically repeating again and again that Democrats will lose in November, while Moore is suggesting the opposite. Moore isn't just echoing the widespread notion that Democrats could hold the Senate while losing the House. He is suggesting that voters "are going to descend upon the polls en masse — a literal overwhelming, unprecedented tsunami of voters — and nonviolently, legally, and without mercy remove every last stinking traitor to our Democracy."
That prediction is likely to cause hyperventilation at all points of the political spectrum. Could he really be right?
To make his point, Moore is going beyond armchair punditry and sending out what he is calling a "tsunami of truth," where each day leading up to the election he offers one specific factual reason why he is right and why it makes sense to be optimistic.
In his second installment, he covered the story of the recent election for the Boise Board of Education, in which Republican Steve Schmidt, an incumbent, was up for re-election. Considering that Trump won Idaho's capital city with 73 percent of the vote, it made sense to assume Schmidt would win again. But as Moore explains, Schmidt had been endorsed by a far-right extremist group, the Idaho Liberty Dogs, that led a campaign against the local library, calling their LGBTQ+ and sex ed materials "smut-filled pornography." According to Moore, they even showed up at local Extinction Rebellion climate strikes brandishing AR-15 assault rifles.
So in a surprising turn of events, the Idaho Statesman, Boise's daily news paper, chose not to endorse Schmidt because he refused to denounce the Idaho Liberty Dogs. Instead, the paper endorsed his opponent, an 18-year-old high school senior and progressive activist, Shiva Rajbhandari, who was also co-founder of the Boise chapter of Extinction Rebellion.
Rajbhandari won. A teenager beat a Republican incumbent in a traditionally red city in one of the reddest states. Moore's point is that if these kinds of seismic shifts are happening at the polls in Boise, there's reason to think that this election won't follow traditional patterns. Voters, he believes, have had enough of the power of right-wing extremists and the threat they pose to democratic values.
In his next "tsunami of truth," Moore reminded readers that despite all the ways that the media tends to make the American right seem massively powerful, they're really just a big bunch of losers. Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the eight last presidential elections. As Moore explains it, "Only because of the slave states' demand for the Electoral College — and the Republicans' #1 job of gerrymandering and voter suppression — do we even have to still deal with their misogyny, their destruction of Planet Earth, their love of guns and greed, and their laser-focused mission to bury our Democracy."
That leads to the next installment: Republicans will lose because this time around they are "running the biggest batch of nutters nationwide in American electoral history." He then promises to offer a list of the top 10 "biggest whackadoodles on the Republican side of the ballot."
No. 10 on Moore's list is Mathew DePerno, Republican candidate for attorney general in Michigan. Like nine other candidates in the 30 state attorney general races this fall, DePerno is an election denier. But he's not just a common, garden-variety election denier; he was allegedly personally involved in a voting system breach. That's right: the Republican candidate who hopes to become Michigan's top law enforcement official is under investigation by the current attorney general for "unauthorized access to voting equipment."
But that isn't the half of it. DePerno also thinks that the Plan B birth control pill is a "form of murder." Moore explains that DePerno "believes that 'life' doesn't begin at conception — he insists it begins BEFORE conception and it should be against the law for anyone to interrupt a sperm on its way to do its 'job.'" As if that weren't enough to categorize DePerno as batshit extreme, he has attacked his opponent with memes that include the white supremacist symbol of Pepe the Frog while comparing his campaign to delivering Michiganders a "really big red pill." Not a Plan B pill, which he likens to fentanyl.
Confirming Moore's view that DePerno's extremism will only going to appeal to a narrow Trumper base, the twitter replies to DePerno are uniformly critical and sarcastic. Like this: "I did nazi that coming. (actually, I did.)." Or this: "I want what you are smoking." Or this post, from @NeverTrumpTexan, "You could just say you were Nazi. It is much easier than what ever that is." Surveying the 50 most recent replies to his tweet, among which include one from Keith Olbermann, every single one is critical and sarcastic.
Moore's 45-day "tsunami of truth" is a clever way to tap into the energy he has described as "Roevember." Moore coined the term back in August, when a funny thing happened in Kansas. Six weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Kansas held an election, which included proposed amendment to the state constitution that could have allowed the legislature to ban abortion. In a surprising shift from typical voting demographics, turnout for the vote was massive, 60 percent higher than in 2018 — and Kansans overwhelmingly voted to reject the anti-abortion amendment.
And that was Kansas, another consistently red state in recent years.
So if we're seeing a swing away from Trump-style Republicans in Kansas and Idaho, there is reason to believe that the combination of Trump fascist nutters on the ballot, the revelations from the Jan. 6 committee hearings, the various investigations into Trump and, last but definitely not least, the fact that the Supreme Court put abortion back on the ballot could lead to the type of voting tsunami Moore is predicting.
Which leads us to wonder why the media isn't covering that story, but is still offering the same stale script about Biden's low favorability and Republican chances of taking back both the House and the Senate. Even Jen Psaki, Biden's former White House press secretary turned MSNBC commentator, offered the downer view that the president wasn't helping his party win.
Media coverage matters. And the fact that the media is largely sticking to pre-established coverage patterns doesn't just mean that it's missing the story, as Moore claims, it also means it's likely influencing the outcome of the election — and not in a good way.
Scholars of media effects know that when news coverage focuses primarily on negative personality coverage, i.e., the "horse race," turnout is depressed. When media focuses on policy, however, including contentious issues like abortion, turnout improves. So all the attention to Biden's supposed unpopularity is not helping.
Further, if the news media tells you the results are a foregone conclusion, that also depresses turnout. I mean, if you are told over and over again that you are going to lose no matter what you do, why bother voting? Even more important, research shows that if the media suggests an election will be close, turnout increases. Some scholars have speculated that the fact that right-wing news outlets reported that the election was close in 2016 elevated the Trump vote, while smug reporting from more liberal outlets, assuming Clinton would win easily, depressed her vote.
Yet almost all news media in the weeks before a major election focuses on predicting the outcome, rather than debating the issues. What's more, the flurry of attention paid to polling, and all the hand-wringing over whether the polling is accurate, only exacerbate the problem. Obsessing over whether or not a given candidate or party will win does almost nothing to help energize voter turnout and engage citizens.
But there's more. For decades, media scholars have described what they call the "protest paradigm." These are the predictable patterns journalists follow when covering protests. They include, for example, a habit of focusing on "small, inappropriate samples of individual protesters," which leads the audience to misunderstand the true nature of the larger movement. The protest paradigm also refers to the news media's habit of allowing elites to frame the story, which misses the positions of average citizens. Even worse, Indiana University professor Danielle Brown explains that this type of coverage "favors spectacle, conflict, disruption and official narratives over the substance of movements that challenge the status quo."
We can observe many of the same habits when the press covers elections. And given that this election in particular could be understood as a protest vote — protesting the assault on women's rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants' rights, democratic rights, etc. — it makes sense to think of this election more in terms of a mass movement than as an example of democracy as usual.
Framing the upcoming vote as a mass uprising of nonviolent civil resistance is exactly Moore's plan. As he explains, his goal isn't just to offer the public another version of the truth; it is also to call out the problems with media coverage. "Much of what many in the media are telling you is patently false and just plain wrong," he writes. "They are simply regurgitating old narratives and stale scripts. They are either too overworked or too lazy or too white and too male to open their eyes and see the liberal/ left/progressive/working class and female uprising that is right now underway."
Moore has a long history of questioning the status quo and bucking conventional thought patterns. Whether getting booed off the Academy Awards stage for opposing the war in Iraq or being the lone voice predicting that Trump would win, Moore has never shied away from disagreeing with the pundit class and political elites. But he doesn't just do it for shock value; he does it because he's paying attention to the political climate in ways the mainstream media tends not to.
Is Moore right that there will be a tsunami of voters determined to defeat the enemies of democracy? The only way to learn the answer is to stop trying to read the tea leaves and focus on making it happen.
ICYMI:
Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truths:
Truth #1: The Campaign
Truth #2: Even a kid from 4th hour Trig class can beat this crowd
Truth #3: The Haters, the Bigots and the Supremacists Always Lose in the End
Truth #4: Introducing The Whackadoodle 10
Truth #5: Trump is not the Big Bad Wolf. But he is very afraid of You.
Truth #6: The Easy-to-Digest Republican Party Platform
Truth #7: Biden, Don’t F**k with Me
Truth #8: If you’re not registered, you can’t Roe, Roe, Roe the Vote!
Truth #9: Why will we win? Because the American people hate fascism.
Truth #10: Meet Blake Masters, Whackadoodle No. 9
Truth #11: 147 Reasons We Will Win on November 8th
Truth #12: Biden just gave us a boost and a toke.
Truth #13: Women. That’s it.
Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth #14
If the Mainstream Media Thinks There’s a Chance We May Be Right about Roevember, Watch Out.
Michael Moore
Oct 11
(A daily series to counter the myth that the Republicans are going to win the House and Senate)
Just 24 hours ago, the award-winning online magazine Salon, became the first nationwide media outlet to tell the world about our Midterm Tsunami of Truth.
The result? Soon the stale, tired media narrative about how “the party in power always loses miserably in the Midterms!” will be put out to pasture in OK Boomerville.
All it takes is one little crack in the journalism dam that blocks fresh thinking…
Read the Salon analysis below, and get ready —
Four weeks from TODAY, MAGA is about to get the whoopin’ of their lives.
By Sophia A. McClennen
October 10, 2022
Remember when everyone thought Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election? No, I don't just mean win the popular vote: Win it all and win big. FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's political projection site, had Clinton's chances of winning at 71.4 percent. Frank Luntz tweeted on Election Day, Nov. 8, 2016, "Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States." One GOP insider declared that for Trump to win, "it would take video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of 'Death to America.'" Pundit after pundit, on the left and the right, joined the chorus of mainstream news outlets to declare that the election was Clinton's.
There was, however, one lone voice of dissent: Michael Moore. In July 2016, Moore wrote "Five Reasons Trump Will Be President." That article mostly went unnoticed by mainstream media after the election, when everyone finally realized Moore was right but it was way too late to make a difference.
Fast forward to the 2022 midterms and we find ourselves in a similar scenario, but turned upside down. Now the media is basically repeating again and again that Democrats will lose in November, while Moore is suggesting the opposite. Moore isn't just echoing the widespread notion that Democrats could hold the Senate while losing the House. He is suggesting that voters "are going to descend upon the polls en masse — a literal overwhelming, unprecedented tsunami of voters — and nonviolently, legally, and without mercy remove every last stinking traitor to our Democracy."
That prediction is likely to cause hyperventilation at all points of the political spectrum. Could he really be right?
To make his point, Moore is going beyond armchair punditry and sending out what he is calling a "tsunami of truth," where each day leading up to the election he offers one specific factual reason why he is right and why it makes sense to be optimistic.
In his second installment, he covered the story of the recent election for the Boise Board of Education, in which Republican Steve Schmidt, an incumbent, was up for re-election. Considering that Trump won Idaho's capital city with 73 percent of the vote, it made sense to assume Schmidt would win again. But as Moore explains, Schmidt had been endorsed by a far-right extremist group, the Idaho Liberty Dogs, that led a campaign against the local library, calling their LGBTQ+ and sex ed materials "smut-filled pornography." According to Moore, they even showed up at local Extinction Rebellion climate strikes brandishing AR-15 assault rifles.
So in a surprising turn of events, the Idaho Statesman, Boise's daily news paper, chose not to endorse Schmidt because he refused to denounce the Idaho Liberty Dogs. Instead, the paper endorsed his opponent, an 18-year-old high school senior and progressive activist, Shiva Rajbhandari, who was also co-founder of the Boise chapter of Extinction Rebellion.
Rajbhandari won. A teenager beat a Republican incumbent in a traditionally red city in one of the reddest states. Moore's point is that if these kinds of seismic shifts are happening at the polls in Boise, there's reason to think that this election won't follow traditional patterns. Voters, he believes, have had enough of the power of right-wing extremists and the threat they pose to democratic values.
In his next "tsunami of truth," Moore reminded readers that despite all the ways that the media tends to make the American right seem massively powerful, they're really just a big bunch of losers. Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the eight last presidential elections. As Moore explains it, "Only because of the slave states' demand for the Electoral College — and the Republicans' #1 job of gerrymandering and voter suppression — do we even have to still deal with their misogyny, their destruction of Planet Earth, their love of guns and greed, and their laser-focused mission to bury our Democracy."
That leads to the next installment: Republicans will lose because this time around they are "running the biggest batch of nutters nationwide in American electoral history." He then promises to offer a list of the top 10 "biggest whackadoodles on the Republican side of the ballot."
No. 10 on Moore's list is Mathew DePerno, Republican candidate for attorney general in Michigan. Like nine other candidates in the 30 state attorney general races this fall, DePerno is an election denier. But he's not just a common, garden-variety election denier; he was allegedly personally involved in a voting system breach. That's right: the Republican candidate who hopes to become Michigan's top law enforcement official is under investigation by the current attorney general for "unauthorized access to voting equipment."
But that isn't the half of it. DePerno also thinks that the Plan B birth control pill is a "form of murder." Moore explains that DePerno "believes that 'life' doesn't begin at conception — he insists it begins BEFORE conception and it should be against the law for anyone to interrupt a sperm on its way to do its 'job.'" As if that weren't enough to categorize DePerno as batshit extreme, he has attacked his opponent with memes that include the white supremacist symbol of Pepe the Frog while comparing his campaign to delivering Michiganders a "really big red pill." Not a Plan B pill, which he likens to fentanyl.
Confirming Moore's view that DePerno's extremism will only going to appeal to a narrow Trumper base, the twitter replies to DePerno are uniformly critical and sarcastic. Like this: "I did nazi that coming. (actually, I did.)." Or this: "I want what you are smoking." Or this post, from @NeverTrumpTexan, "You could just say you were Nazi. It is much easier than what ever that is." Surveying the 50 most recent replies to his tweet, among which include one from Keith Olbermann, every single one is critical and sarcastic.
Moore's 45-day "tsunami of truth" is a clever way to tap into the energy he has described as "Roevember." Moore coined the term back in August, when a funny thing happened in Kansas. Six weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Kansas held an election, which included proposed amendment to the state constitution that could have allowed the legislature to ban abortion. In a surprising shift from typical voting demographics, turnout for the vote was massive, 60 percent higher than in 2018 — and Kansans overwhelmingly voted to reject the anti-abortion amendment.
And that was Kansas, another consistently red state in recent years.
So if we're seeing a swing away from Trump-style Republicans in Kansas and Idaho, there is reason to believe that the combination of Trump fascist nutters on the ballot, the revelations from the Jan. 6 committee hearings, the various investigations into Trump and, last but definitely not least, the fact that the Supreme Court put abortion back on the ballot could lead to the type of voting tsunami Moore is predicting.
Which leads us to wonder why the media isn't covering that story, but is still offering the same stale script about Biden's low favorability and Republican chances of taking back both the House and the Senate. Even Jen Psaki, Biden's former White House press secretary turned MSNBC commentator, offered the downer view that the president wasn't helping his party win.
Media coverage matters. And the fact that the media is largely sticking to pre-established coverage patterns doesn't just mean that it's missing the story, as Moore claims, it also means it's likely influencing the outcome of the election — and not in a good way.
Scholars of media effects know that when news coverage focuses primarily on negative personality coverage, i.e., the "horse race," turnout is depressed. When media focuses on policy, however, including contentious issues like abortion, turnout improves. So all the attention to Biden's supposed unpopularity is not helping.
Further, if the news media tells you the results are a foregone conclusion, that also depresses turnout. I mean, if you are told over and over again that you are going to lose no matter what you do, why bother voting? Even more important, research shows that if the media suggests an election will be close, turnout increases. Some scholars have speculated that the fact that right-wing news outlets reported that the election was close in 2016 elevated the Trump vote, while smug reporting from more liberal outlets, assuming Clinton would win easily, depressed her vote.
Yet almost all news media in the weeks before a major election focuses on predicting the outcome, rather than debating the issues. What's more, the flurry of attention paid to polling, and all the hand-wringing over whether the polling is accurate, only exacerbate the problem. Obsessing over whether or not a given candidate or party will win does almost nothing to help energize voter turnout and engage citizens.
But there's more. For decades, media scholars have described what they call the "protest paradigm." These are the predictable patterns journalists follow when covering protests. They include, for example, a habit of focusing on "small, inappropriate samples of individual protesters," which leads the audience to misunderstand the true nature of the larger movement. The protest paradigm also refers to the news media's habit of allowing elites to frame the story, which misses the positions of average citizens. Even worse, Indiana University professor Danielle Brown explains that this type of coverage "favors spectacle, conflict, disruption and official narratives over the substance of movements that challenge the status quo."
We can observe many of the same habits when the press covers elections. And given that this election in particular could be understood as a protest vote — protesting the assault on women's rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants' rights, democratic rights, etc. — it makes sense to think of this election more in terms of a mass movement than as an example of democracy as usual.
Framing the upcoming vote as a mass uprising of nonviolent civil resistance is exactly Moore's plan. As he explains, his goal isn't just to offer the public another version of the truth; it is also to call out the problems with media coverage. "Much of what many in the media are telling you is patently false and just plain wrong," he writes. "They are simply regurgitating old narratives and stale scripts. They are either too overworked or too lazy or too white and too male to open their eyes and see the liberal/ left/progressive/working class and female uprising that is right now underway."
Moore has a long history of questioning the status quo and bucking conventional thought patterns. Whether getting booed off the Academy Awards stage for opposing the war in Iraq or being the lone voice predicting that Trump would win, Moore has never shied away from disagreeing with the pundit class and political elites. But he doesn't just do it for shock value; he does it because he's paying attention to the political climate in ways the mainstream media tends not to.
Is Moore right that there will be a tsunami of voters determined to defeat the enemies of democracy? The only way to learn the answer is to stop trying to read the tea leaves and focus on making it happen.
ICYMI:
Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truths:
Truth #1: The Campaign
Truth #2: Even a kid from 4th hour Trig class can beat this crowd
Truth #3: The Haters, the Bigots and the Supremacists Always Lose in the End
Truth #4: Introducing The Whackadoodle 10
Truth #5: Trump is not the Big Bad Wolf. But he is very afraid of You.
Truth #6: The Easy-to-Digest Republican Party Platform
Truth #7: Biden, Don’t F**k with Me
Truth #8: If you’re not registered, you can’t Roe, Roe, Roe the Vote!
Truth #9: Why will we win? Because the American people hate fascism.
Truth #10: Meet Blake Masters, Whackadoodle No. 9
Truth #11: 147 Reasons We Will Win on November 8th
Truth #12: Biden just gave us a boost and a toke.
Truth #13: Women. That’s it.
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