Someone at NPR came up with the idea of finding out what voters are thinking in the swing districts, now that the Democrats' Jan. 6 spectacular, starring Liz Cheney, is in full throttle.
Oops.
To say the least, the prim Victorian-gentlemen leftists at that award-laden outfit were in for a surprise:
Kimberly Berryman lives in the countryside outside Fredericksburg, Va., but drives 20 miles to the suburbs to do her shopping. She keeps a cooler in the trunk to keep her corn cold as she travels from store to store, trying to find the best deals on groceries.
For Berryman, it's worlds away from the hearings about the Jan. 6 insurrection going on at the U.S. Capitol.
"I got other things to do," she said with a laugh.
Berryman, who works with special needs students, said she was shocked and scared by the attack at the Capitol. But she said she's more worried about price hikes and supply shortages than litigating Jan. 6.
"Just move on to something else," she said.
Berryman said she usually votes for Democrats, including Abigail Spanberger, who currently represents the competitive 7th Congressional District in Congress. But Berryman said she'll consider voting for a Republican if they do a better job addressing her concerns about high prices.
"There are people out here that really can't afford it. And I'm one of them," she said.
Voters like Berryman are testing whether Democrats can focus attention on the Jan. 6 committee's findings, while also convincing voters they're trying to address issues like rising prices. Their ability to balance that may determine if the party can get its coalition to show up in the November midterms.
They kind of misread that in their nut graf: The lady told them she didn't care about the Jan. 6 crap. NPR said she was all concerned about whether Democrats can focus attention on both the hearings and the Bidenflation.
They must have been trying to save some semblance of their pre-determined storyline.
The reality is, inflation is not being addressed by Joe Biden and his Democrats, because Democrats don't care about it all that much, and worse still, don't have any idea what causes inflation.
Mike Gonzalez at the Heritage Foundation lays it out well in two tweets:
The NPR piece notes that Rep. Abigail Spanberger, the embattled Democrat in the district seeking to defend her seat against multiple GOP challengers, claims she has addressed inflation by voting 'yes' on bills to spend more to prevent baby formula shortages and to spend more to hire more truckers as her solution to inflation. As you can tell, she seems to think inflation is about supply chain breakdowns, a byproduct of inflation, if not a separate issue, not money printing. Her solution is to throw more government money at a few individual problems, because it's all so easy to get the Fed to print up another batch.
The food prices? The gas prices? The stuff the lady was complaining about in the lead to the NPR piece? Nope, she has nothing to offer voters on that, but NPR didn't probe.
"In addition to that, I'm focused on our democracy, the health of our democracy, and ensuring that something like we saw on Jan. 6 doesn't ever occur in the future," Spanberger said in an interview.
Which is exactly what the swing voter just said she didn't care about.
NPR for good measure quotes some #NeverTrump as their means of balancing their story with a supposed conservative. The #NeverTrump does a Spanberger, too, insisting that while high prices are indeed important, Jan. 6 is even more important.
Never mind the voter.
Then NPR moves down to its outraged descriptions of the Republican challengers, who somehow have put on all the war paint of naked Trumpism, not even trying to hide it.
Despite the moderate lean of the district, [GOP candidate Yesli] Vega has gone all in on Trump and racked up endorsements from some of his high-profile supporters, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. She's vowed to back another Trump presidential run and said she supports impeaching Biden.
She's hardly alone. Two other Republicans in the field, state Sen. Bryce Reeves and Army veteran Derrick Anderson, a self-described "Trump conservative ," have made the former president a focus of recent TV ads. Reeves, who was one of just four Republicans in the state Senate to vote for a $70 million audit of the 2020 presidential election, says in his ad that Trump "shows how to stand up for the principles and values that make America great."
"I'm ready to finish what he started," Reeves says in the ad .
Didn't that give NPR a clue?
Seems that if the Trumpster Republicans are not even trying to ignore their Trump ties as they battle to unseat Spanberger, and in fact are touting those connections loudly, there might just be a message that is selling among these swing voters -- a stronger one than what the 'yes, but...' #NeverTrump claimed about the Jan. 6 hearings being more important.
NPR didn't call attention to that part.
It's too soon to tell how these midterms will go in this Virginia swing district, but obviously something isn't fitting the left's narrative. As Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics noted:
...what we've got here is a backfire. The Jan. 6 hearings are not only junk politics, a rigged show trial where everyone knows how the story will end, we have a Democrat party that is being read as out of touch on the matter. That's political poison come November.
Even NPR is tiptoeing around that issue, not being able to find anyone to claim anything else. They must have tried. They came up empty. Nobody cares about the Jan. 6 sh**show while inflation is ravaging the country.