Omicron Is Feeding the Republican Conspiracy Beast

Jonathan Bernstein: “Normal political parties are dominated by the electoral incentive. Politicians want to win and then retain office; campaign professionals want to win to improve their reputations and, perhaps, to reap financial rewards; governing professionals want to win so that they can govern; activists and donors want to win so that they can influence policy, and in some cases because they, too, want jobs when their party is in office. With almost all individual incentives running that way, the party collectively comes to place a high priority on winning.”

“But party-aligned media do not necessarily share that incentive. Being out of office is good for business because negative partisanship means more viewers and more clicks when there’s an opposite-party president to dislike. Normally, party-aligned media aren’t important enough within a party for their commercial interests to overwhelm the party’s political ones, so its members tend to follow the lead of politicians and campaign professionals, both because access to them is important and because party actors generally adopt the goal of winning elections.”

“However, as we’ve seen lately with the Republican Party, the more central party-aligned media become within the overall party, the less important winning becomes.”