Love in an Elevator: Joe Biden Hijacks the New York Times Editorial Board Reveal

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast.

Related Post Roulette

19 Responses

  1. Ozzzy! says:

    Jaybird! You found your excited person!Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Ozzzy! says:

      Yes!

      See? That’s the sort of thing that moves votes. And Holly Otterbein is 100% right about the optics.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

        Thinking about it, maybe this won’t move votes (because this story doesn’t seem to be getting any play).

        But if I wanted to ask the question like “why didn’t the base get out there for X?” after an election that I was 99% sure would go for X, I’d look at stuff like this and how much of it there was for X and how much of it there was for Y.Report

        • Ozzzy! in reply to Jaybird says:

          It probably won’t move votes, but it does give a snippet view into the non-online people who like Joe Biden, like, alot.

          That is a class of person too long hypotheticised but missing from the discussion for a long while now.Report

  2. good piece! I didn’t know about that.Report

  3. Kazzy says:

    Just to clarify, this is their endorsement for the primary? Or the general? People (at least people here… this is the only place I’m reading about it) are talking about this like it is the latter but I’m pretty sure it is the former.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

      The New York Times had a dual endorsement of Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar for the primary. (We discussed that here.) But you’re right. That’s not their general election endorsement.

      That said, I am 99% sure that their general election endorsement will be whomever happens to show up and get the nomination. Even if it’s Bernie.

      (Well, if it’s Bernie, drop me down to 95% sure.)Report

      • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

        That’s what I thought. Which makes it interesting that in that thread you linked to the Wiki page on their endorsement for the general election.

        A few questions…
        1) Do they typically make an endorsement for the primary?
        2) Does it typically get much fanfare?
        3) If the answers to those questions are “yes” and “no” (respectively) than I wonder if this whole shebang was about generating clicks. Which makes them less stupid and more desperate. I’ll leave it to others to form their own opinions on which of those is worse.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

          Huh. There doesn’t seem to be a page devoted to New York Times Primary endorsements.

          I found this and this from 2008 (the second one will *SHOCK* you). Which made me wonder… did they endorse any Republicans in 2016? Yes. Yes they did.

          They really should have a wiki page for primary endorsements. That would be a gold mine.Report

          • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

            So a thing that hasn’t even garnered a Wikipedia page suddenly goes off the rails and becomes the story-of-the-day. Color me unimpressed.

            You DO know you could just like, create that Wikipedia page, right?Report

            • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

              Eh, what I think the story of the day part of it is this:

              30 votes. 6 of them for someone who had dropped out. 1 of them for Bloomberg.

              While, yes, the NYT is representative as hell of a particular variant of Liberal (educated, online, upper half if not upper quarter of SES for the country), it seems to be less representative of other types.

              I’d compare to us here, actually.Report

            • Marchmaine in reply to Kazzy says:

              I’m not sure that dismissing this as nothing-burger is quite accurate.

              This was the official NYTimes editorial page endorsement of their preferrend candidate(s) for the Democratic Nomination in an attempt to influence votes.

              They announced/revealed it on National Television. Its a thing.

              Endorsements are part of the calculus for 538 analysis (among others) and its something oft discussed.

              Now, whether its a fading thing, and outdated thing, a meaningless thing or a hapless fling… that’s worth discussing, and we kinda did. But its not a JB idiosyncrasy.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Marchmaine says:

                My point is not that we should dismiss it as nothing. My point is that it seems that the NYT got a little whacky with their primary endorsement, perhaps to generate buzz. I trust the vote totals as reported. But… there was a winner and yet they opted to announce co-winners? Why? Well, we’re talking about it ain’t we? And they did this TV thing… has that ever been done before? If not, why now?

                Had they simply written an Editorial announcing their endorsement of the leading vote getter among their editorial staff (Warren), would we have had nearly this much to say? No, we’d have discussed whether we agreed or disagreed and why. But now we’re discussing the whole shebang because they opted to make a spectacle of it. I’m not going to treat the *spectacle* as a thing beyond the NYT trying to draw more attention to this… for whatever reason.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Kazzy says:

                Thanks, I see… welcome aboard, I think we all see the endorsement as wacky – I’m not sure we all agree exactly how its wacky, though.

                The spectacle of it all is something I hadn’t really thought about… print moving to video to tik-tok to whatever’s next just seems standard fare these days.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

                If the NYT did what they did to generate buzz, that is also a story in and of itself.

                I’m not sure that if that is the story whatever the NYT says tomorrow is necessarily worth paying attention to, though.Report

  4. Jaybird says:

    Wait, I was wrong. We *DID* have a Biden post back in our endorsement symposium.

    There might be hope for us yet.Report