All too often the media’s Presidential debates focus on matters that are trivial, irrelevant, back burner issues to conservatives.
That trend continued last Wednesday night in Milwaukee.
And working class Americans are furious after Fox News completely ignored the issue that is most critical to Americans in their debate.
Former President Donald Trump was missing from last week’s first Republican Presidential Primary debate.
Having climbed in national polling from the 40s to north of 50% while his opponents lost ground, Trump reasoned that he had little to gain by mixing it up with competitors who are currently far behind in support.
But unfortunately for Republican voters who wanted a lively discussion of issues that mattered to them, Trump was hardly the only thing missing from the debate.
Hardly any talk of inflation at the debate
According to a recent Economist/YouGov survey, 25% of Americans say that inflation is the top issue facing America.
This dwarfs other issues such as climate change at 11%, health care at 10%, and jobs and the economy at 10%.
Indeed, inflation is an important issue for 96% of adults.
In a separate survey from the technology company Qualtrics, 38% have looked for a second job while another 14% plan to do so.
Even worse, 70% of working parents said their pay isn’t keeping up with the cost of living, and about 47% of that group have looked for a second job.
Yet at the Republican debate, very little time or attention was paid to this critical issue.
That this issue wasn’t font and center in a Republican debate is scandalous.
The inflation that has gripped this country in the past couple of years is the worst we’ve seen in four decades.
But during Wednesday night’s debate, working class Americans were treated to lengthy discussions on abortion, and Ukraine was brought up 23 different times.
That’s not to say that those issues aren’t important, but a debate without a focus on the increasing number of Americans who are struggling to make ends meet is a missed opportunity.
That’s especially true given that enough time was made to ask longshot former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie about UFOs, and there was an entire subsection on climate change.
No wonder Fox News is fading
While Fox News was able to boast 12.8 million viewers for the Presidential debate, this was barely more than half of the first 2016 Presidential debate that featured Trump.
That debate, in August 2015, saw 24 million tune in to watch.
For Fox News, it seems that actively antagonizing its viewers has come at a cost.
The network has hemorrhaged viewers in the 8:00 PM time slot ever since it parted ways with former host Tucker Carlson.
In the end this is just one more data point showing that if the network isn’t in tune with what matters to loyal viewers, they are going to wind up with far fewer of them.
US Political Daily will keep you updated on any developments to this ongoing story.
