Kalli Dalrymple | Collegian
Salena Zito writes daily for the Washington Examiner, weekly for the New York Post, and a monthly column for the Wall Street Journal. She was the second Eugene C. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism this semester.
When did your interest in journalism begin? How did you get started in the industry?
My grandfather was a newsman and his father was a newsman. So I think my interest began as a young kid, and my grandfather would bring all these newspapers from around the world home on Sundays. And I would just plough through them. I would read these newspapers from all over the country and that really sparked my interest in news. I worked in the high school newspaper. After I got married, I was a stay-at-home mom until my kids were teenagers. I did a variety of small jobs, but only when the kids were in school, and then I went back into writing in the early 2000s. I wrote a couple stories for a blog that had national implications and the local newspaper asked me to be a columnist. Within two weeks, they hired me full time, so I started as a columnist and then quickly became a reporter and columnist.
You were one of the few reporters who took Trump seriously in 2016. What’s your prediction for the 2020 election and when do you think we will actually know the results?
So 2020 is different from 2016. I would argue that it’s also different from 2008 and 2012, where you saw a trajectory of where people were going and you saw less reluctance of people to participate in polling. You understood that it was more likely than not that Barack Obama would win both elections, both by voter sentiment and also by polling. In 2016, you saw a different phenomenon, but you still saw a trajectory towards Donald Trump.
The 2020 election cycle has been a challenge to predict for a variety of reasons. We’re not quite sure who people end up blaming in the voting booth for COVID-19. I think it depends on where you live. There are some people who are going to blame local officials, local governors, local county officials, and they will suffer in the voting booth. Some people will blame the president. So there’s the COVID-19 factor.
Do you trust political polls?
If you look at polling, college-educated voters robustly answer polls because they’re working from home. Most of them cannot wait to tell you that they’re not going to vote for Donald Trump. But with non-college-educated voters or college-educated voters in suburbs where there’s a mix of college and non-college educated voters, you see people more reluctant to answer that question. So I think polling is off, not because the pollsters are bad, but because they’re not getting the full universe. I’m more likely to believe that this race is a jump ball, that if Joe Biden wins, it won’t be by the large numbers that people are predicting. Conversely, if Donald Trump wins, it’s probably going to be by an equally small margin. It might resemble what we saw in 2016. But I honestly can’t say who I think wins. But I do think that polling is a challenge these days.
If polling isn’t reliable, what do you think is the best indication of voter opinion?
I tend to rely on cultural cues. People won’t tell you directly but will tell you indirectly through their behavior or things that are important to them. That’s where I look: things that tend to make us want to gather around and participate in that are non-political, that have become political, like national sports. That’s a cultural cue, and the amount it has dropped off in viewership. You would think that because a lot of us are stuck at home because of COVID, we would be rushing to watch sports because sports has always been the great connector. Because sports organizations, in particular the NBA and the NFL, have decided to become social justice warriors, there’s a cultural cue in how the viewership is down. So culture is telling us something. Also, another indicator is the amount of people who are first time gun owners. The Second Amendment is something that people have largely thought only belongs to people on the furthest right in our country. That’s not been true. But nonetheless, if people are purchasing guns, guns are not cheap, and it requires an investment of time in to learn how to use one,are they going to then go vote against their no purchase? So those kinds of cultural cues are things that put the brakes on the from saying, ‘oh, Biden’s gonna win this.’
Do you have any thoughts on the future of conservative populism in the U.S.?
It’s not going away. Whether Donald Trump wins or does not win, this new coalition of conservative populists is not going away. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle. They’re not going to be the party of Mitt Romney. That’s part of who conservatives are, but that’s not the whole cloth, like it used to be. And I think it’s really important that people always understand that Donald Trump did not cause this movement, this realignment of the Republican Party. He is the result of it.
A lot of people get their news from Twitter, or other social media. Is this a good source of information?
No, do not get your news from social media. A recent study by Pew Research Center on Twitter use, concluded that just 10% of users produced an astounding 92% of all tweets, and 69% of the highly prolific users are Democrats. If you break those numbers down further, democrats that are on Twitter are predominantly liberal, more so than Democrats who aren’t on Twitter. In other words, anyone reading Twitter to get their sense of what the average Democrat thinks we’ll get a skewed impression. Twitter only has 36 million daily users; that’s what Pew’s survey showed. And it also showed that there are at least 3 million people who are responsible for nearly all of those tweets. And so, in other words, Twitter is not a reliable place to understand what’s going on in American politics, nor was a great way to understand what was going on with Brexit, not once, but twice.
How should people follow the news?
If you’re an average person, and you really want to understand what each candidate stands for, I would go on YouTube and just look at their speeches. There’s no filter there. That’s the best way of looking at the things that they say at like county fairs or at local school boards, or at a road rally. That’s without a filter. Now, speeches are usually written by someone else, but you get a sense of what’s important to this person.
Do you have any advice for college students, specifically Hillsdale College students?
Put your phone down. That’s easier said than done. I was on Twitter for 12 years. I had 80,000 followers. I had a blue check, yet I was not a better person because of social media and I was not a better reporter. I think it’s more important to be connected to a community than it is to be connected to social media. When the internet first came out, because I’m old and I know when that happened,the idea was like the Wild Wild West. It turned out to be more of a weapon, rather than a resource. I find the things that I learned in my life don’t come from social media. They don’t come from cable news. They come from life experiences, and I would highly encourage people to be more connected to their communities and less connected to their devices in their hands.