"Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Donald Trump?"
asks the headline in
The New York Times shortly after the election. Weirdly, that article - and hundreds like it purporting to explain the previous 2016 election - lacked even a single mention of the roughly
1,500 right-wing talk-radio stations that saturate every corner, no matter how remote or rural, of America.
As a
2008 Pew Research poll found, 16 percent of Americans got their general election-year information about presidential candidates from talk radio, a percentage that had held constant for eight years at that point, despite the explosive growth of the Internet over the same period.
Talk radio gave Lindsay Graham the edge to hold his seat in South Carolina - defeating Jaime Harrison's advertising - with
16 radio stations covering the Palmetto state. And in that flood of coverage, there was not one progressive voice speaking to the white community. Graham bet national and local talk-radio hosts would back him, and he was right, a reality that polling seems to have missed.
Read more
here.
-Thom
