Thomas Edsall

by Pete Mazzaccaro

Award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall, a political writer with five books and a 25-year tour of duty as a national political reporter for the Washington Post to his credit, spoke to a packed auditorium at Germantown Friends School about the remarkable nature of this year’s Presidential election.

As he introduced a PowerPoint presentation he had prepared for them, Edsall told the students that he thinks in political terms.

“If I’m walking down the street and see a car accident,” he said, “the first thing I think is ‘Will this help Republicans or Democrats?’”

Edsall had prepared his presentation based on questions he had received from GFS students. Much of the theme of the nearly hour-long talk was about what made the Donald Trump candidacy and the 2016 election unprecedented.

“This election is very different from elections in the past,” Edsall said. “One the biggest changes is that the electorate is getting flipped on its head. Democrats have long been the party of the working class while Republicans have been the party of the professional class. This election has changed that, particularly among whites without a college degree. This is a real realignment.”

Much of Edsall’s presentation referred to current and past polling, which is a large part of what he does in his weekly analysis piece for the New York Times. With large bar graphs and trend lines projected behind him, Edsall walked the students through polls that illustrated authoritarian support for Trump and Hispanic flight from the GOP, much of which lent themselves to the theme that the 2016 election was on the extreme end of many electoral trends during the last 25 years.

One diversion from that theme was a discussion, brought on by a question, about media bias in coverage and the high amount of so-called “free media,” the coverage Trump gets, largely from cable news networks just by virtue of how “entertaining” he is.

Edsall said he did believe there were significant issues with media bias and felt most of that bias actually harmed the Clinton campaign. From a disproportionate amount of attention being paid to her ties to the Clinton Foundation to attempts to give equal weight to the statements of both candidates, Trump has been allowed to get away with things no candidate could in the past, Edsall said.

“Trump’s outrageousness has posed issues for the press that are far different than in the past,” he said, pointing to the fact checking website Politifact’s scoresheet on Trump that scored 69 percent of his statements as “mostly false,” “false,” or “pants-on-fire” lies. “He doesn’t tell the truth often.”

Trump’s candidacy, he said, defied logic.

“I don’t know how he can be so competitive,” Edsall said. “He represents something really alien to the American tradition.”

Edsall did, however, acknowledge that Hillary Clinton is a weak candidate.

“She’s not a good politician,” he said. “She’s not charismatic. People support her, but they don’t love her, and many don’t like her.”

Edsall wrapped up his discussion by urging the students, most too young to vote, to volunteer for campaigns if they wanted to contribute.

“Volunteering for a campaign is interesting work,” he said. “Pennsylvania is a competitive state, so turnout is very important.”