MISCELLANEOUS CHARTS….The Project for Excellence in Journalism released a report a couple of days ago showing that so far during the 2008 campaign season, Democrats have gotten more favorable coverage than Republicans. Now, maybe you believe this and maybe you don’t, but what caught my eye was the reason Democrats got such favorable coverage. Two words: Barack Obama. The chart on the right shows the results for each of the six leading candidates, and Obama’s coverage is almost stratospherically laudatory. So I grabbed the raw data and removed Obama from the analysis entirely to see what would happen. Answer: the positive vs. negative coverage was virtually identical for Democrats and Republicans.
Bottom line: the press isn’t in love with Democrats, it’s in love with Barack Obama.
Tonight’s second chart comes from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, which released a report Wednesday telling us that the key to success for the Democratic Party was unmarried women. Page after page presents evidence that they vote more heavily for Democrats than practically any other group and could produce huge victory margins in the future if we just addressed their issues better and got them out to vote.
Now, I’m already predisposed to believe this because my sister belongs to this demographic and she’s always complaining about how she’s completely ignored during campaign season. And she’s right. There are always a million and one proposals for helping “families,” but nothing aimed at unmarried women.
So fine. Except for one thing. Take a look at the chart on the right, which is practically the only place in the entire report where you can see this. It’s true that 66% of unmarried women vote for Democrats, but by extrapolation a little more than 62% of unmarried men also vote for Democrats. That’s not really much of a difference. So why not just focus on the unmarried demographic as a whole, which is also heavily biased in favor of Dems but is also twice as big?
