The Growing Cable News Divide in Midterm Vote Preference

November 01, 2010, 7:49 PM GMT+0

This weekend’s Rally to Restore Sanity was in many ways a rally against the oftentimes alarmist and hyper-partisan rhetoric of MSNBC on the political left and the Fox News Channel on the political right. Or, as Jon Stewart put it on Saturday, “We work together to get things done every damned day! The only place we don't is here [in Washington] or on cable [news]!”

Even the most ardent fan of The Daily Show, though, might be surprised by just how partisan the MSNBC and Fox News audiences have become. In a testament to the ideological purity of these two cable news outlets, a YouGov Poll conducted last week indicates that there might be no greater divide in tomorrow’s midterm elections than the chasm between regular watchers of the Fox News Channel (30 percent of the sample) and Americans who receive most of their televised news from MSNBC (10 percent of the sample). Indeed, only 5 percent of respondents who get their news from Fox said they were going to pull the lever for the Democratic congressional candidate on November 2. A whopping 84 percent of MSNBC viewers, however, expressed support for their districts’ Democratic candidate. By comparison, that 80 percentage point difference in vote share is larger than the divide in midterm vote preferences between very liberal and very conservative Americans (9 percent to 76 percent Democratic); it’s even larger than the division between Strong Republicans and Strong Democrats (2 percent to 77 percent)!

Those of us who frequently watch MSNBC and Fox know that both channels have become increasingly extreme in recent years. It should probably come as no surprise, then, that the cable news divide in voter preferences has widened substantially since the last midterm election. According to the October 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study—a YouGov-Polimetrix survey of over 30,000 respondents run by Harvard political scientist, Steven Ansolabahere—13 percent of Fox News viewers intended to vote for the Democratic congressional candidate in that year’s election compared to 62 percent of respondents who received most of their national news from MSNBC. While that 50 percentage point difference in Democratic vote share was one of 2006's more prominent dividing lines, it obviously pales in comparison to the 80 point gulf in 2010 midterm vote intention between Americans who get most of their news from MSNBC and those who rely on Fox as their primary source of televised information.

Unfortunately, there is simply no way of establishing from the data how much of this expanding cable news divide in party preferences is caused by the persuasive effects of partisan news content. That is, we cannot say whether MSNBC and Fox are causing viewers to become more supportive of Democrats and Republicans or if liberals and conservatives are merely seeking out their respective cable news channel to confirm preexisting political beliefs. Either way, the profound partisan sorting of the Fox and MSNBC audiences suggests that Jon Stewart’s call to restore sanity to the cable news airways will not be answered any time soon.