First, you have to imagine the fawning (local and national) wall-to-wall coverage this would get if a Republican governor left the GOP for the Democrat Party. Now, back to reality.
CBS was the only network in the Big Three to give the story anytime. But during CBS Evening News, Anchor Anthony Mason down played the development with a mere 13-second-long news brief:
The President is promising a big announcement at a rally this evening in West Virginia. Spoiler alert: The news is the governor of West Virginia is switching parties. Democrat Jim Justice is becoming a Republican.
Perhaps the party switch was too hard for ABC and NBC to swallow. Especially since the switch further solidified the Republican party’s dominance in the 50 states. With the affiliation swap of Governor Justice, the GOP now controls the governorship in 34 states.
I know nothing about Jim Justice, he could be a relative of Buford T., for all I know, but that hardly matters. The media’s treatment is what is most telling, remembering what would happen were it a Republican.
The defection of a Republican Governor to the Democrats would be a complete repudiation of Trump and the GOP. There would be non-stop coverage at every level and local stories by local reporters in all the New Hampshire Media, for days, if not weeks. It would be seismic.
Everyone would be asked what it means, and thousands of hours would be spent crafting the GOP’s long sought after Trumpian requiem.
So what happened when an elected Democrat governor leaves for the party of Trump after a year of ceaseless efforts to demonstrate exactly the opposite.
Almost every cricket got the day off.
Unlike the verboten Wasserman-Schultz/Imran Awan story, two New Hampshire papers have web links to stories by AP and the Washington Post. SeacoastOnline, and the Keene Sentinel.
There isn’t a whole heck of a lot of navel-gazing. The AP story is 128 words. The Post story is longer but includes a seismic nugget of its own. Justice was a registered Republican until 2015. He left the GOP in the age of Obama but the Democrat parties antics since Trump are what drove him back.
Talk about a punch to the throat of your narrative.
I know, I know, the Russians did it.
