Yet Another Dog Bites Man Story

I noted last month that media, both alt and legacy, had built up the idea that the governor elections in both New Jersey and Virginia were tossups in the polls and even potential upsets. Instead, we got predictable results in both, blue states electing Democrats. Then, almost immediately, we got both alt and legacy media pushing the idea that the special election in the Tennessee 7th House district was a tossup and could be an upset. For instance, intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds in the New York Post, the day before the election:

This week, a special election in Tennessee’s 7th District, pitting GOP military veteran Matt Van Epps against far-left candidate Aftyn Behn, will show them just how far their base can take them.

Going by conventional wisdom, this should be a walkover for Van Epps: The district leans Republican by 10 percentage points, and Van Epps’ policy positions echo those of the previous incumbent, former Rep. Mark Green, who resigned in July to launch a new business.

Spoiler alert: Van Epps won by nine points. I asked Chrome AI mode, "What were the polls showing just before yesterday's election in TN 7?" It answered,

Just before yesterday's special election in Tennessee's 7th Congressional District (held on December 2, 2025), the few publicly released polls showed the Republican candidate, Matt Van Epps, with a slight, single-digit lead over the Democratic candidate, Aftyn Behn.

The most notable and final poll, from Emerson College Polling/The Hill and administered just a week before the election (November 22–24, 2025), found:

- Matt Van Epps (R): 48%

- Aftyn Behn (D): 46%

This 2-percentage-point lead was within the poll's margin of error (± 3.9%), indicating a very tight and competitive race leading into election day.

Real Clear Politics hyped this over the weekend, but if Van Epps won by 9%, this was wildly outside the poll's 3.9% margin of error. This is precisely the same sort of outcome we had in New Jersey and Virginia, which I discussed in this post.

Of course, a 9% margin, even if it made the polls look bad, was low in comparison to Republicsn margins in prior elections, even in non-presidential election years. I asked Chrome AI mode, "What was Mark Green's victory margin in the TN 7 House election in 2022?" It answered, "Mark Green won the election with a victory margin of 21.9 percentage points." This was more than double Matt Van Epps's margin, but the fact that it was a special election right after the Thanksgiving holiday must certainly have been a factor.

But Glenn Reynolds had his knickers in a knot the day before:

But she’s polling better than she has any right to. And she just might win.

. . . Not long ago, it would have been unimaginable for New York City to elect a far-left Muslim mayor with open sympathy for terrorist groups after 2,976 people were killed, and thousands more injured, in Islamic terror attacks on the World Trade Center.

But New Yorkers — at least those who turned out to vote — did just that last month.

Likewise, Tennessee might soon have a congresswoman who will make AOC look like a dignified stateswoman.

. . . [I]f Democrats do pull off a win this week, it will be a grave warning to Republicans about the dangers of complacency.

Roger Simon has an only slightly better take:

What does this mean? Not a lot. I would define it as “Much Ado About Nothing. . . Much.”

. . . The local GOP, with a few exceptions, never got in gear to seriously win this election against the target-rich Behn until the last couple of weeks. The Democrats had been going full tilt for a long while. Don’t blame the GOP voters.

I take "never got in gear" to mean "didn't spend serious money". But the fact is that Van Epps still won by a comfortable margin well outside the polls, when spending for the week prior to election day would have been lost in the Thanksgiving distractions in any case. Commentary prior to the election made the point that Democrats could still say, even if Behn lost, that they'd forced the Republicans to spend money on an otherwise safe race. It sounds as though the Republicans at least didn't spend more than they needed to.

But a much bigger takeaway is this: I think it disproves Joel Kotkin's conclusion over the weekend:

Long a cakewalk for progressives, the culture war is edging towards high noon. For the first time in decades, the left faces competitors who read from different scripts and come from different perspectives.

. . . Mainstream media have become disconnected from at least half their audience. Overall public confidence in the press is near a historic low: barely a third express trust, half the share that did so in 1978. This is not just an American phenomenon – the travails of the once-respected BBC in the UK make that clear.

The gulf between the media and audiences widened after the George Floyd riots, when major media companies – in print, film, radio and online – doubled down on an ever more overt progressivism. They downplayed far-left violence and embraced a mission not of informing or entertaining, but of ideological propagation.

I don't think this is true at all. Mainstream and legacy media, enabled by their usual allies, the pollsters, have been running the same sort of psyop over last month's and yesterday's elections: the line is that Republicans are underperforming, and this is due to Trump. And note that, even after the departure of its most visible editors, with new owner Jeff Bezos steering things toward the putative center, The Washington Post still ran a fake news story on Trump and Hegseth ordering the military to "kill them all", with inevitable visions of Keitel at Nuremberg.

We shouldn't kid ourselves about any of this, the media is the media,and that includes a lot of people who convince themselves that even though they're now media too, they're somehow different. That most definitely includes Glenn Reynolds, Roger Simon, and Joel Kotkin.