F**king Mondays: Biden Is Screwed? The Huff Post Carcass, And Trump's Hummus

Polls, polls, polls

It’s that time of week again: f**king Mondays, and your quick hit guide to the upcoming week:

What happened to The Huff Post?

I started The Daily Banter many years ago with the lofty ambition of becoming the next Huffington Post. I managed to get two of the best columnists on the site (Bob Cesca and Chez Pazienza) to come work with me and we set about creating a snarkier, ballsier version of Arianna Huffington’s groundbreaking website. We didn’t quite make it (although at our peak we had a reporter at the White House and routinely generated millions of page views a month).

We had to retreat to a newsletter format after Facebook decimated us — and almost every serious publisher in the mid 2000’s — because I felt I could not keep up the relentless pace of publishing needed to keep advertising money coming in.

The newsletter format that allowed us to stop chasing traffic and ad money, and focus entirely on quality. I’m now a big believer in subscription based publishing because of what traffic and advertising incentives can do to a site — like the Huff Post. Here’s a recent headline from the once great site:

The “1 Thing You Wouldn’t Guess” headline trick is reminiscent of the early 2010’s when Buzzfeed bombarded social media with endless listicles and crappy gossip articles (The Huff Post was actually acquired by Buzzfeed in 2020 for an undisclosed sum and is now run by BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, who seems to have run both companies into the ground).

The actual article is brief summation of something Mary Trump said to Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC and could have easily been generated by AI. We’re in 2023 and no serious outlet would dream of running something like this. But apparently there’s still money to be made churning out easily copied content with clickbaity headlines.

I don’t like to dump on other sites, mostly because I know how horribly hard it is to build a successful media outlet. But articles like this really do bother me because, well, it’s just lazy. The Huff Post is now just a news aggregator gaming social media algorithms for clicks, trading off of its former name and making money in the most obnoxious way possible. This isn’t good for the news industry, or online publishers, and the sooner the Huff Post is put out of its misery, the better.

“Joe Biden Is In Trouble” (Yawn)

Panic! Run for the hills! It’s all over!

Much of the professional media is in full meltdown mode over President Biden’s prospects in 2024. From fears of viral right wing memes to hazy polls taken over a year before any votes have actually been cast, Biden is apparently a dead man walking. Here is director of polling at the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School John Della Volpe in the New York Times today warning liberals that “Joe Biden Is In Trouble”:

Whether it’s due to faltering confidence in institutions like the government and the media or simply about protecting one’s mental health from seemingly relentless cycles of bad news, the result is the same: In 16 focus groups I’ve led recently, young voters told me they are more aware of society’s chaos and conflicts than they are of what the president argues is a record of progress, millions of good jobs and a robust G.D.P. Even as he has canceled $127 billion in student debt and made headway on the economy, climate, marijuana and gun safety goals, Mr. Biden finds himself playing more defense than offense with a demographic skeptical that he is doing enough to make their lives better or make the country a more just place.

Not only that, young people are angry with Biden because “he’s not doing enough” so now they won’t vote for him:

Many young voters are already actively entertaining the alternative, independent candidacies of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. According to a new Quinnipiac University poll last week, upwards of 40 percent of registered voters under 35 indicate they are supporting Mr. Kennedy and his anti-establishment message or Mr. West, the public intellectual and author, in a hypothetical matchup against Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump.

A couple of points worth noting here. First, polls this far out from an election are entirely useless. It’s a snap shot of public opinion when most people aren’t paying attention to Presidential politics. Polls might even be entirely useless right up to the day of voting given 2020 saw enormous predictive errors. I’m not saying the Biden team shouldn’t be concerned about some of these trends, but we really do need to get some perspective on this.

Second, I would just like to voice my frustration with the “young people.” I’m sorry, but isn’t pulling the US out of a major pandemic, reviving the economy, creating millions of jobs, expanding health coverage to millions of people, bringing NATO back from the dead, unifying the Western world in opposition to Russian imperialism, and stopping a madman destroying democracy at home enough? What more does Biden have to do?

Volpe is a pollster so it is his job to conduct this sort of research, but a) it isn’t interesting this far out, b) young people are notoriously flaky, and c) a lot of them won’t vote anyway. In summary, don’t panic. At least not yet.

Trump’s legal woes part 84037

This is a highly entertaining segment from Morning Joe for a number of reasons. Firstly, the Trump mashup is hilarious (apparently “hummus” is attacking Israel), and secondly, Chris Christie does a fantastic job summarizing why Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations are in grave danger:

Christie believes that the charges against Trump in the four trials he faces are so serious and so well supported by turned witnesses that it will be impossible for him to avoid conviction. And if that happens, his campaign is most likely finished. Granted Christie is not a fan of Trump’s, but he is a former federal prosecutor who knows the law.

See you next week!

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