The Corporate Media's Wishcasting Coverage of the Invisible Kamala Harris Campaign

“As you can see from this next chart, we have the Electoral College in toss-up range even if [Vice-President Kamala] Harris wins the popular vote by between 2 and 3 points. And she’d need to win the popular vote by roughly 4 points to [be] truly ‘safe’ in the Electoral College,” wrote polling guru Nate Silver in September of 2024. That same month, high quality polls showed former president Donald Trump leading Harris in key battle ground states. Many pollsters concluded that the race is very close, and will be decided by a handful of votes. Other polls indicated a drop in support among male and black voters (including young voters) since Harris became the nominee for president. Meanwhile, Silver argued that former president Donald Trump had a 55.8 percent chance of winning the 2024 presidential election as compared to 44 percent for Harris.

Historically, Silver’s predictions have largely been lauded by the corporate media for their thoroughness and accuracy. However, in 2024, Silver’s predictions about the closeness of the race have been buried under massive amount of wishcasting journalism that celebrates the successes of the Harris’ campaign. Such approaches to reporting illustrate how the corporate news media system privileges pre-selected hyper-partisan conclusions over the available evidence.  

As scholars and journalists like Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi have noted, the corporate news media in the US frames news stories as a battle between Democrats and Republicans. Democratic Party-leaning outlets such as MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post largely offer glowing praise for Democrats while maligning Republicans. The reverse is true for Republican-leaning outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Fox News Channel, The Epoch Times, The Washington Examiner, and One America Network. Voters are increasingly aware of this lack of objectivity in news coverage.

A case in point: in 2024, Stephen Colbert was interviewing Kaitlan Collins of CNN on his popular late night television program, and he inadvertently drew laughs from the audience, that noticeably interrupted the interview, when he started to say to Collins “I know you guys are objective over there, that you just report the news as it is.” Regardless, the problem with framing every story as a Democrat versus Republican issue is that it misinforms voters about the reality of important topics and their relevant details, including the Harris campaign.

After months of downplaying concerns about President Joe Biden’s cognitive state, Democratic-leaning media embraced the lack of a formal primary process, effectively positioning Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s nominee for 2024. For example, on his late night show Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill Maher pointed out to his guest Kaitlin Collins of CNN how the majority of CNN’s coverage of Harris’s convention speech was overwhelmingly positive noting “I watched Kamala’s speech last night, it ended at…11:09 in the east. It wasn’t until 11:23 until the one conservative, guy…lonely Scott I call him –.” Collins, clearly frazzled, ignored the evidence that Maher provided and argued that CNN did provide critiques of both candidates. Similarly, rather than confront threats to Harris’s viability, CNN hosted an historian who claimed to be able to predict that Harris would win in 2024.

But it is not just CNN, as Democratic-leaning media collectively celebrated Harris’s ability to raise historic sums of money, promote joy and good vibes, and engage celebrities and major donors. They appealed to the diversity among liberal voters, emphasizing how a woman of color was poised to become the next president of the United States. Indeed, some have argued that this is why Harris is breaking with tradition and avoiding solo hard hitting interviews: the Democratic leaning press is making the case for her, so she is not incentivized to take an interview and risk hurting her image. At the same time, they repeatedly suggested that Trump’s candidacy was flailing, asserting that he could not find an effective line of attack against Harris, sending an early message to voters that Harris was poised to win the presidency.

In contrast, Republican-leaning media outlets did a better job of highlighting Nate Silver’s data-driven analysis, which suggested that Trump was on track to win the election if current trends continued. Coverage of Silver’s analysis was featured prominently in Republican leaning news outlets, but very little, and in some cases not at all, in Democratic-leaning media. This is not to suggest that right-wing media provides an accurate portrayal of the Harris candidacy. They have relied on equally baseless attacks, such as claiming that the ABC presidential debate was rigged against Trump, Harris was involved in a 2011 hit and run accident, Democrats have access to Trump’s hacked emails, and Harris is a communist who only recently identified as Black.

Many of the unfounded claims against Harris in Republican-leaning media originate from independent conservative outlets. A more recent baseless attack on Harris in independent pro-Republican media claims that the she is an alcoholic. They argue that Harris’s addiction has led to a poorly managed campaign. It is true that Harris has a high turnover rate among her staff, but the alcoholism theory seems based solely on altered images and videos taken out of context and speculation on social media. Despite the lack of substantial evidence, Republican independent media have amplified the story, and it is now making its way into the corporate media landscape.

It needs to be stated that left-leaning independent media do not enjoy the same relationship with corporate, Democratic-leaning outlets as independent right and Republican leaning media do. In fact, leftist media critiques of Harris have been ignored by the pro-Democratic press. These include Harris’s mismanagement of DNA records when she was a district attorney that led to the “crime lab scandal,” her decision to withhold evidence that could have freed a man on death row, refusal to have a Palestinian American speak at the Democratic Party Convention (while allowing Republicans and other DNC critics to speak), and support for centrist or right-wing policies regarding the Israel-Gaza conflict and the capital gains tax. Interestingly, because left driven critiques have the potential to hurt Harris and inadvertently help Trump, Republican leaning media is more likely to pick up these stories than Democratic leaning outlets. Instead, Democratic-leaning media do a disservice to their audience as they ignore these stories and critiques to maintain a rosy portrayal of their good-vibes candidate of joy.

Silver’s prognostication will likely change as Election Day approaches. However, if it holds true, the election outcome will be a surprise to Democratic-leaning audiences, an uncanny repeat of the 2016 election. They will not be aware that there was legitimate policy-based resistance to Harris on the left or that Trump’s message was resonating with voters more than Harris’s in critical battleground states by September. This will likely lead to Harris supporters doing what Clinton supports did when this occurred in 2016: blame the Russians, leftists, populists, and any other available boogieman instead of confronting the fact that the establishment media system they trusted misled them…again.

Democracy needs a truly free press that reports the facts, even when audiences do not want to hear them, otherwise, election outcomes will continue to be a surprise to those coddled in their ideologically siloed news bubbles.

Nolan Higdon is an author, lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz, Project Censored National Judge, and founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas. Higdon’s areas of concentration include podcasting, digital culture, news media history, propaganda, and critical media literacy. All of Higdon’s work is available at Substack (https://nolanhigdon.substack.com/). He is the author of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (2020); Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (2022); The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People (2022); and the forthcoming Surveillance Education: Navigating the conspicuous absence of privacy in schools (Routledge). Higdon is a regular source of expertise for CBS, NBC, The New York Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle.