The New Flyover Country

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/7701630476/" target="_blank">Flickr/Barack Obama</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


President Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney by assembling a coalition of unprecedented diversity—in an electorate that was 72 percent white, 44 percent of Obama voters were not. But in the dull lexicon of Washington political reporters, a rich, NPR-listening white liberal remains the favored stereotypical shorthand for a Democratic voter.

For example, in an otherwise interesting piece about the right’s media bubble, Politico describes Obama’s coalition as more ominvorous in its media appetites because “there are as many, if not more, NPR-oriented liberals as MSNBC devotees on the left; the Democratic media ecosystem is larger and more diverse.” So when summing up the media appetites of the most diverse electoral coalition in American history, Politico‘s two examples are liberals who watch NPR and liberals who watch MSNBC. That’s when they’re being polite. If they’re trying to affect a derisive tone they might go with “the coffee-drinking NPR types of Seattle, San Francisco and Madison, Wis.”

The NPR stereotype itself is overblown—liberals make up 36 percent of the NPR audience, while 39 percent consider themselves moderates and 21 percent conservatives. NPR’s audience is more highly educated than the country as a whole, but the candidate who won Americans without a college degree was Barack Obama. In real life, NPR’s journalism just also isn’t liberal

More importantly, the notion that people with liberal or left-of-center views are all NPR devotees is a right-wing meme the mainstream media has mindlessly parroted for years. I suspect why this happens because the upper-middle-class liberals in the DC metro area are the Obama voters Beltway reporters frequently come in contact with. That’s why much of the national media’s image of the quintessential Obama voter remains some yuppie with a taste for gourmet coffee. There is no room in that political shorthand for the retired black Marine in Ohio who knocked on doors for the Obama campaign, or the Latina mom who stood in line for hours—at three different times—just to be able to cast a ballot. The working-class people of color who now make up much of the base of the Democratic Party often seem as invisible to political media as they were to the Romney campaign, which the New York Times described as being shocked that the Obama operation turned out “voters they never even knew existed.”

You can almost understand the Romney campaign’s surprise. The national media doesn’t talk to these voters much—they work hard and play by the rules but were never the group that politicians used to refer to as “working hard and playing by the rules,” because before Obama, only white people were described that way. Political consultants never refer to them in cute, condescending shorthands like “soccer moms” or “NASCAR dads.” They may drink beer, but they’re never the folks who the reporters mean when they talk about “Joe Sixpack.” They drive our buses, care for us when we’re sick, clean our hotel rooms, teach our children, cook our meals, answer our noise complaints, and much more. Their political views aren’t discussed or explored so much as summed up as a matter of “demographics,” as though their votes were settled by genetics rather than individual agency. They are the new “flyover country,” except they’re not so much flown over as invisible to the people who rely daily on their labors. The political press often lacks the vocabulary to describe them, and until last week they could be safely disregarded.

That’s no longer true. But a political press used to communicating the soul of America in tired metaphors meant to paint a superficial portrait of a certain kind of working-class white voter from the South or Midwest is ill-equipped to tell you about them. References to NPR and lattes won’t cut it, not that they ever did.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate