By Dave Andrusko

Salena Zito is the kind of reporter that all of us should want, regardless of whether we are pro-life or pro-choice, Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal. She has her eye to the ground and picks up tremors that lesser reporters miss.

Yesterday she ran an intriguing story in the Washington Examiner under the headline, “Biden’s speech was not the win the political class thought it was.” She used as an example the hyper-partisan Joe Scarborough who announced the day after pro-abortion President Joe Biden gave his State of the Union Address that he had given

“his best speech of his presidency by far. … Strongest speech, and, most importantly, for people that were thinking, ‘Oh, he’s too old. He’s too that, man’ … he gave a lot more than he got.”

But that was mild praise, by comparison to CNN’s Stephen Collinson who wrote that Biden “projected vigor and forcefulness” and “was a trenchant master of the chamber of the House of Representatives, effectively wielding the theatrics of the presidency and commanding an hour of unfiltered primetime television.”

But that’s not the opinion of the suburban voters in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, the kind of voter Biden must have to fend off former President Donald Trump.

However, Zito wrote,

“in sitting with several voters whose presidential choices have been all over the place for the past 20 years, with some of them jumping from George W. Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden, the president’s comportment did not come off as strength.

 

Instead, many of them felt they were being yelled at.

 

Intellectually, they all understood why Biden needed to project vigor. They also all agreed that vigor and yelling are not the same thing.

NPR handled it well, Zito wrote.

Reporter Tamara Keith spent some time with Karen Seagraves, 52, the kind of independent voter President Joe Biden’s campaign needs to attract in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and her home state of North Carolina.

 

Keith wrote an hour into Biden’s speech that Seagraves said she wasn’t feeling it.

 

“I think this entire thing has been lackluster,” Seagraves told her, adding, “I can’t think of a better word. Just — vanilla,” she said.

The legacy media was out to lunch– again! [Underlining added]

Yet those of us reporting about what we heard and saw and experienced on the ground thought, “Wait a minute, the liberal media aren’t telling the entire story nor focusing on the voters who would decide the election.”

 

In the rare times the liberal media did focus on those voters, the voters were treated as caricatures, such as that they were all without a college education. Not true. College-educated men and women did vote for Trump, the reporters were just looking in the wrong counties. Reporters focused on counties with a high education propensity such as Delaware County and ignored college-educated voters where the education achievement was mixed, as in Washington County.

So the dominant narrative was that “Biden was back.” Not so. ABC News conducted a poll after the speech that

showed 29% said that he had done better than they expected, 12% said it was worse than expected, and 24% said it was exactly what they expected.

 

A whopping 35% said they did not read, see, or hear about the address.

Then there was this from Zito

When you dig deeper into the poll, voters gave Biden abysmal marks on the economy, inflation, crime, and immigration, with Biden trailing Trump anywhere from 6 to 16 percentage points on those issues.

Conclusion?

The misguided media narrative shows the importance of watching the people who will turn this election one way or another, rather than the people who share the media’s worldview.