The holiday season is passing quickly. Thanksgiving is already in the rear view mirror, soon to be joined by Christmas and Hanukkah. And come the fast approaching January 1st the bell officially rings to welcome in 2026.
Which is another way of saying, the 2026 congressional election year is about to dawn. Which, in turn, raises what should be obvious questions. Those questions would be:
- How will the liberal “mainstream” media cover the 2026 election?
- Will they make the election a referendum on President Trump?
- As a result of 2026, who will the media pronounce the presumed winner in the 2028 presidential sweepstakes? For both parties?
Common sense says that the answers to all of those questions are not yet knowable. And probably won’t be until the day after the 2026 election. But of one thing, based on past experience with the media, Americans can be sure. They know that the media coverage of the 2026 election will lean left. Beginning long before the election has even been held. With a heavy bias to saying that President Trump and Republicans are the losers.
The off-year elections gave Democrats great hope of a dramatic sweep to retake the House and Senate. Affordability and every other news topic will be grist for Democrats to blame the current status quo on the GOP. Redistricting offers hope of staying in the House majority, but can it match the sway of incessant media bias?
In the long ago - the very long ago - of the 1960 presidential campaign between Democrat Senator John F. Kennedy and Republican Vice President Richard Nixon, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Theodore H. White wrote what would be the first of many books and articles following and reporting in detail on a presidential campaign. In doing so White, writing in his bestselling The Making of the President 1960 described the press covering Democrat Kennedy as follows:
There is no doubt that this kindliness, respect and cultivation of the press colored all the reporting that came from the Kennedy campaign, and the contrast colored adversely the reporting of the Nixon campaign. By the last weeks of the campaign, those forty or fifty national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps-they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers. When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr. Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier.
To say the least, there has been much political water over the political dam since 1960, and the shape of the media is very different. But the essence of the problem with the 1960 media following Democrat Kennedy as described by White remains -- if not being even more problematic.
The hard fact here is that much of today’s media, as with the 1960 media and Nixon, has a visceral loathing of both President Trump and Republicans in general. Which in turn will, in 2026, affect the media coverage of the election. And affect that coverage both in terms of individual Senate, House and governor races as well as the overall coverage of the election in general.
So as the final lap of the holiday season approaches, rest up. Because when 2026 finally dawns, the media’s 2026 election coverage will begin.
And it won’t be pretty.
