Article Reflection No. 14

Photo Credit: USA Today

Article: How Red Mirage Shaped the 2020 Election Narrative

Reflection:

After watching and reading about the January 6 hearings, I encountered an unfamiliar term that sounded interestingly similar to a “red herring”: a “Red Mirage”. Curious, I searched up the phrase.

In the article “How Red Mirage Shaped the 2020 Election Narrative” by Hawkfish, author(s) elaborates on data collected and analyzed by Joe Wlos and Dr. Ellen Konar. The 2020 Presidential election, the article argues, was strongly based on the disparity between in-person voting and mail-in voting. While liberals resisted in-person voting because of the surging coronavirus pandemic, those on the right resisted mail-in voting because popular politicians had told them that it invalidated their vote. This leads to the Red Mirage, which held the idea that Donald Trump was winning the 2020 election as in-person votes rolled in first. A self-explanatory statistic is how approximately ⅓ of Joe Biden’s supporters were planning to vote in-person, when, in contrast, over ½ of Trump supporters were. As the article states, this means that approximately ⅔ of Biden’s supporters, compared to less than ½ for Trump, had votes rolling in later.

A “red herring” is similar to the “Red Mirage” because both are deceptive. Often, they offer hope for certain demographic(s).

I never knew about the Red Mirage, and learning about it has reminded me of the importance of watching and reading election news carefully, using reliable, moderate sources. Politics is politics, there’s no denying that.