On the first Sunday following Donald Trump’s sweeping victory on November 5, CBS’s 60 Minutes featured a somber post-election analysis carried out by Scott Pelley, the former CBS Evening News anchor who previously treated President Biden to two absurd softball interviews.
Pelley’s apparent disappointment at the election result was outshone only by his seeming lack of understanding as to what possibly could have led to a second Trump victory.
Much of the discussion felt as though it had been plucked out a 2016 election postmortem. Evidently Pelley had only just begun to notice middle class voters abandoning the Democratic party for Trump due to the economy and the border.
Pelley’s first interview subject was Roz Werkheiser, a restaurant owner who supported Trump on November 5 for primarily economic reasons:
SCOTT PELLEY: You grew up in a Democratic household.
ROZ WERKHEISER: Yes.
PELLEY: But you just voted for Donald Trump?
WERKHEISER: Yes
PELLEY: Inflation is down by more than half. Interest rates are falling Mortgage rates are falling Wages are going up. Are you not feeling that?”
WERKHEISER: I don’t feel it. No, I don’t feel it. I don’t feel it at all. Everybody I talk to, nobody’s wages went up.
Everyday people understood intuitively that Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 signaled something of a realignment among the working class. Eight years later, a handful of leftwing media people have finally begun to catch on. It’s enticing to blame this near-decade-long lack of understanding on the middling intelligence of many journalists, but that’s a bit too simplistic of an explanation.
From the beginning of Trump’s first campaign in 2015, through the end of his first term in 2020, the media’s numerous failed attempts to understand his popularity were hopelessly marred by racialist narratives. If you ask a journalist from 2018 about Trump’s base, they would never mention the working class without first inserting the prefix, “white.” They saw Trump appealing not to a beleaguered working class in aggregate, but rather to a cadre of bitter, closed-minded rubes who happened to share a loosely-defined economic bracket.
All of that brings us to the next portion of the 60 Minutes postmortem: Scott Pelley having his mind blown by the news that working-class hispanics turned out for America’s new President-elect.
“Democrats would’ve expected to do really well with latino voters,” he remarked to another interviewee, working-class latino man identified as Ronald. He continued: “Donald Trump made a lot of inroads in this election, and I wonder why you think that is.”
Pelley was especially fascinated that Ronald actually liked the idea of border security, despite not being white: “Today, Ronald finds some common ground with Trump — even on immigration!”
Of course, the piece also included a bout of obligatory head-scratching over why voters had rejected the a wildly unpopular candidate who polled at one percent in 2019 and who did not receive a single vote in the 2024 primaries.
When all the votes are counted, Vice President Harris is going to be several million votes short of where Joe Biden was in 2020. Why?… Why would Democrats not turn out in the numbers they had before?
Finally, Pelley brought in freshly-ousted Congresswoman Susan Wild (D-PA), who argued that the Democratic party needed to stop focusing so much on unpopular, niche social issues (which she described as “very important”):
If you are struggling to pay your rent or feed your kids, you don’t have the privilege of thinking about things like LGBTQ rights… Unfortunately, I think our party needs to figure out that not everybody is just thinking about these very important social issues.
Judging by the meltdowns we saw late last week across liberal broadcast, cable, and print news media, it’s hard to see the journalistic class taking to heart any of the lessons Pelley learned in this edition of 60 minutes. Only time will tell.
