Philip Bump

The closeness of the 2016 Presidential election — 78,000 votes in three states gave Donald Trump the victory — means that small things could have swung the result. So, too, could big things, like former FBI Director James Comey’s late-campaign revelation that the bureau had found new emails that might be relevant to the server investigation. They weren’t, but the announcement resuscitated the subject right as voters were about to head to the polls. However, the inspector general’s report reinforces an unimportant point about this response to the 2016 election.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders has held briefings less frequently than her two predecessors, her briefings have been shorter, and she has been more likely to fill up time with guests who can’t speak to what the White House is doing. Between January 2016 and Jan. 20, 2017, President Barack Obama's press secretary Josh Earnest spent 11,800 minutes briefing the media, with his deputies adding another 906 minutes. Since late last July, about 10 months, Sanders has spent 2,800 minutes briefing the media, only about four more hours than Sean Spicer spent during his tenure in the White House.

The Media Research Center says that 91 percent of network news coverage of President Donald Trump from January through April 2018 was negative. [The Media Research Center, please note, is part of the conglomerate of conservative enterprises funded by Robert Mercer and his family, the folks that also funded Cambridge Analytica, Breitbart and former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon.] To which President Trump replied: "The Fake News is working overtime.

In March, Quinnipiac University’s pollsters asked Americans if they thought certain news outlets — unnamed by Quinnipiac — were enemies of the American people? Nearly 4-in-10 said yes — including more than 8-in-10 Republicans. In a poll released April 26, Quinnipiac was more direct. Less than a quarter of the public says that the news media broadly is better described as “enemy of the people” than an “important part of democracy.” But among Republicans, more than half preferred the former term to the latter. Granted, there was a limited set of options from which to choose.

[Commentary] There were a lot of rational reasons that Republicans kept a laserlike focus on Obamacare from 2010 to 2016. And  there was a lesson Democrats could take from that. Find an intractable issue that excites the base, and push forward on it, no matter what. They may have found that issue — net neutrality. There’s a legislative tool called the Congressional Review Act, that gives Congress the right to overturn regulations put into effect by the executive branch within 60 working days of the rule being finalized.

Generally speaking, pollsters are ill advised to ignore cellphone users, if only because they’d be missing half of the country. But there’s another reason that pollsters need to include cell users: The demographics of those with and without access to landlines is stark. Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic adults in the United States live in households that are wireless-only. More than half of black adults and Asian adults do, as well.

DC media stalwarts Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei (formerly of Politico, now of Axios) broke down President Trump’s media habits. No books, lots of TV. Newspapers, but only certain ones. Lots of political talk shows, both on the nets and on radio. We combined the Allen-VandeHei analysis with our own observations of Trump’s Twitter activity and statements to put together this approximate Week in Presidential Media-Watching.

Press conferences are a chance for the media to work together to wring information out of a recalcitrant politician, to give as full a picture to the public as possible. Donald Trump knows, though, that he doesn't have to do them if he doesn't want to and, what's more, that the media is flummoxed when he is dishonest on those occasions that he answers our questions.

September 27 was National Voter Registration Day. To the extent that you were aware of this, it was probably because you, like me, were greeted with a prompt to ensure you were registered when you went to Facebook to see what some-guy-you-went-to-high-school-with's baby looks like. Or maybe you visited Google, where the daily doodle was focused on the subject.

If people clicked that, they were taken to a search page for "how to register to vote." Or, in Spanish, "registrarse para votar." After that push, Google saw a huge spike in searches for the Spanish-language phrase. Hispanic Americans typically vote at much lower rates than other groups. Census Bureau data suggests that Hispanics turn out for presidential elections at about the rate non-Hispanic white Americans turn out for midterms. There are a variety of reasons for this, but it has been a focus of Hispanic organizations for some time to boost those numbers. It has also been a priority for Democrats, particularly this year. Hispanics tend to vote more heavily Democratic than Republican, and activists see an opportunity this year given Donald Trump's disparaging comments about Mexican immigrants.

At the top of his rally in the critical Wisconsin county of Waukesha, Donald Trump accused Google of both impeding and bolstering his candidacy. "A new post-debate poll, the Google poll, has us leading Hillary Clinton by two points nationwide," he said, "and that's despite the fact that Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton. How about that." As it turns out, this is classic Trump: Running full steam ahead with any sketchy evidence that seems like it might be helpful to him. Here's each thing he was referring to, so you can judge for yourself.