Long Island Rejects the CNN Candidate

On Tuesday, voters across the country overwhelmingly rejected the incumbent administration and the advocacy of the media. Perhaps no House race better encompassed that phenomenon than New York’s First Congressional District, where former CNN anchor John Avlon lost by over ten percentage points to Republican Nick LaLota despite a concerted media effort to foist him into government. 

Avlon outraised his opponent by nearly 20% with donors including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, hedge fund manager Dan Loeb, and former HBO CEO Richard Plepler. Throughout the campaign, he received endorsements from Liz Cheney, Billy Joel, and Don Lemon. “You can trust him,” Lemon insisted. 

For months, the media establishment fawned over their chosen avatar. “He was well-dressed, articulate, and telegenic,” Slate gushed. In New York Magazine, Avlon compared himself “to a Norman Rockwell painting … the guy standing up in a town hall.” Just one day before the election, ABC News insisted that his race was “razor thin.” 

Their enthusiasm was understandable as he parroted the media class’s most familiar talking points. He insisted defeating Trump was necessary to “defend our democracy” yet called for the former President to be banned from ballots for “insurrection.” He staunchly supported US funding for the war in Ukraine. And during the Covid response, he embraced every destruction of American liberty.

At the onset of the pandemic, he criticized what he deemed to be insufficient crackdowns on civil liberties during lockdowns, lamenting “the lack of strict nationwide measures to contain the outbreak.” He called Australia, Hong Kong, and Japan “gold standards” in their responses, as their citizens were jailed for leaving their homes. As a CNN pundit, DHS considered him an “essential worker,” and he became a pro-mask zealot as he derided all critics. 

Then, he championed vaccine mandates, calling them “self-interest with a deadline.” He remarked, “Fear and doubt tend to fade away when they face a forcing factor,” and celebrated that one-third of US service members took the shots after the military threatened to fire them if they refused. 

Despite his track record, the media portrayed him as a return to normalcy candidate, “a West Wing throwback,” championing him – the son of a centi-millionaire – as a representative of the people during his campaign from his summer home in Sag Harbor. 

But Long Island, like the rest of the country, rejected the establishment’s narrative and elected Republican Nick LaLota by a margin of 11.5%, the largest GOP victory since 2016. 

In the New York Times, columnist Damon Linker diagnosed the issue underpinning the establishment’s failures in this election cycle: “there simply aren’t enough voters in the mood to celebrate that establishment and its works.”

He explains:

“The reasons for this lost trust are almost too numerous to mention. Aside from the aforementioned Iraq War and financial crisis, there was a pandemic response by public health officials that many thought was far too draconian, with lockdowns causing widespread suffering and psychological and educational damage to children; a humiliating and demoralizing withdrawal of military forces from Afghanistan; the sharply rising prices of 2022 and spike in interest rates that followed, making many working people feel significantly poorer; skyrocketing public debt; surging rates of homelessness and the spread of tent encampments in American cities; a tense, frustrating and seemingly endless stalemate in Ukraine’s war with Russia; and a flood of undocumented migrants streaming over the southern border, which continued largely unabated for years until the Biden administration was forced by political reality last summer to firmly address the problem.”

Avlon was the perfect mannequin for the lies responsible for the voters’ deserved distrust of their compromised institutions. He blamed criticism of the Afghanistan withdrawal on “foreign disinformation.” On CNN, he dismissed critics of Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” as “missing the point” and insisted that they should stop “obsessing over short-term problems.” He touted a proposed immigration bill that would have codified the entry of two million migrants across the border per year. And according to Avlon, the pandemic response was insufficiently draconian, the spending in Ukraine was insufficiently generous, and the border crossings were insufficiently welcomed. 

This was the pattern across the country; elites blamed their critics for noticing their shortcomings, and they offered blithe platitudes in lieu of solutions. Their campaign was singularly focused on the demonization of their political opponent and lacked any semblance of self-awareness. 

The celebrity endorsements, the name calling, the mandates, the dilapidated cities, the destruction of our border, the depletion of our petroleum reserve, the mania of the trans movement, the profiteering of race-baiting, the lawfare aimed at their political opponents, the hyper-sanitized campaigns; they were all meant to demoralize you, the citizens witnessing the decline of our country. 

Avlon and his fellow “essential workers” decided that you should be ashamed, that you owed penance. But, as we learned Tuesday, elections are referenda, not secular confessionals, and Americans had the self-respect to tell their elites no. They would not stand for the lies, they would not indulge the emotional manipulation, and they would not reward their leaders’ dereliction of duty.