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Causally related. Because every Democrat is treated to a friendly media environment they all have artificially boosted popularity, which erodes in a national campaign, because, 2020 excepted, you still have to actually campaign to become president. Basically, they all are running for office on easy mode, and for a presidential candidate, that can't be fully maintained. Sure, national media is still a D++ advantage nationally, but I seriously doubt they could win in Illinois without the media bias. At the state level its worth like 20 points in the polls.
I think this would have been true before internet, social media and cell phones. Biden essentially had to avoid live events as much as possible to get by, and even then people noticed that Biden was doing few live events. Any future candidates will have to appear in public and the public will be perfectly free to post and comment on anything he says or does amiss. Short of another pandemic, Biden can’t win because he’ll have to go do live events and rallies and his failures will be filmed and obvious.
I think the same goes for anyone else. Yes a friendly media helps, but given how easy it now is to share information, I don’t see any way to prevent negative things from coming out. Even with Twitter bans and a press eager to squash the story, most people had at least heard about the Biden Laptop. It was “suppressed” but everyone who cared about it could easily find at least some information about it. Which means that the media isn’t that good of a filter for democrats at the moment.
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