On Sunday, ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos served up a heavy dose of “blue wave” rhetoric, featuring a segment dedicated to the purported Democratic surge, an interview with a Democratic Senator from a red state, and a Republican strategist who had already decided that the GOP would be losing the House in 2018 “by 40 or 50 seats.”
During a discussion about President Trump’s apparent aversion to delegating tasks to his cabinet, Republican strategist Alex Castellanos interjected to offer a gloomy outlook for both the President and the GOP:
It’s hard to believe when Republicans lose the House in 2018, maybe by 40 or 50 seats, that House is not going to impeach him. And it’s also hard to believe that a U.S. Senate that’s going to be scared to death, though maybe still in Republican hands, is not going to take a serious look when it has to deal with this President.
None of the other panelists objected to this assessment by Castellanos — nor did any seem overly surprised that a supposed Republican strategist would treat his own party’s spectacular defeat as a foregone conclusion.
Throughout the show, a chyron appeared intermittently which listed the upcoming topics that would be covered, one of which was titled, “Is A Blue Wave Coming?” The content of this segment was rather self-explanatory. After a brief clip played of Republican Congressman Ryan Costello (PA) discussing his decision not to seek re-election, Stephanopoulos noted emphatically that Costello was the twenty-third Republican Congressman to announce his retirement.
He then sat down with ABC national correspondent Tom Llamas to discuss Democrats’ electoral prospects in 2018. Republicans were referenced in this segment only in their capacity as the opponents of Democratic congressional hopefuls, or in cases where a Republican Congressman's aspirations for higher office left an open seat for Democrats to seize. Immediately after this analysis, Stephanopoulos conducted an interview with Democratic Senator Doug Jones, who had recently won a special election in Alabama. Unsurprisingly, the majority of his questions for the Senator amounted to requests for advice advice to other Democrats seeking to unseat Republican contenders.
Liberal media bias is often a game of plausible deniability. After all, Stephanopoulos never stared directly into the camera and whispered, “I hope the Democrats win.” Yet even a cursory glance at the content of Sunday’s show betrays the approximate political views of those who created it. Of those examples named above, none were more brazen than a segment about the 2018 midterms being both named after and entirely focused on specifically the Democratic party’s political aspirations.
Presumably, there are also still at least few Republican strategists out there who don’t believe a cataclysmic GOP defeat in 2018 is already written in ink — though on Sunday’s This Week, there were none to be found.
