WHY LOOK AT REALITY WHEN YOU HAVE VIBES?

The New York Times has posted an unusually bad story under the headline "6 Voters React to Attacks on Iran Ahead of the Texas Primaries." Here's the subhead:

President Trump has said the attacks were necessary for the security of the United States and to free the Iranian people from oppression. Do voters agree?

But we don't learn whether voters agree with Trump, we learn whether six Texas voters agree with him -- and not one of them reports ever having voted for a Democrat.

I can understand focusing on Texas -- tomorrow is the state's primary election day, with early voting underway, and it's not clear who'll win Senate primaries in both major parties. But this is not a representative sample of Texas voters:

* "Nate McHale, 24, has voted for President Trump twice, a product of his conservative leanings. He supports the decision to strike Iran."

* "Craig Wallace is not a fan of President Trump’s style, but he supports his policies on the economy and immigration and has voted consistently for him since 2016. He supports the strikes in Iran as well...."

* "Tex Peterson has voted for President Trump in every presidential election. He supports the president’s policies generally, he said, and that goes for the strikes on Iran, too."

* "Matt Lutz is a libertarian and skeptical about foreign conflict. He voted for Gary Johnson, not President Trump, in 2016. But he said he supported the president’s approach to Iran, on balance...."

* "Angela Gschwend, a stalwart Trump supporter, ... said her Persian friends cried tears of joy upon learning of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran over the weekend....

"'I’m a Christian. I believe in peace and love,' Ms. Gschwend said. 'But sometimes you have to fight when you’re attacked. They want to kill because they hate, and that’s the opposite of my worldview.'"

There's one Iran-attack skeptic, and even he was a Trump voter:

* "Gael Ramirez, a student who describes himself as an independent, voted for President Trump for the first time in the 2024 election....

"He is skeptical that the nation will be helped by the strikes on Iran."

Six people, no Clinton, Biden, or Harris voters, five people on board with Trump's attacks.

You'll say that the Times loves Republicans and therefore we shouldn't be surprised at this. But the paper's editorial board called the attack on Iran "reckless," and the paper has published deeply skeptical columns by Nicholas Kristof, David French, Ben Rhodes, and others.

Previous roundups of ordinary voters' opinions haven't been quite so biased. A piece titled "11 Voters on Trump’s First Year," published on December 29, included four people identified as Harris voters and five identified as Trump voters. An October story called "7 Voters Weigh In on Trump’s New Ballroom" had a similar mix.

I think the Texas panel is skewed Republican because the Times has fallen for Texas vibes. It's true that Republicans win every statewide race there, and have throughout this century. But it's not a blood-red state like West Virginia or Idaho, where Democrats struggle to reach 30% of the vote.

Donald Trump won Texas comfortably in 2024, by a 56%-42% margin. But Trump's Texas victory margin in 2020 was 52%-46%. Biden won 5,259,126 votes in Texas in 2020; Harris won 4,835,250 in 2024. The Times couldn't find any of these people, or any of the 3,877,868 Texans who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016?

Just as the myth of Trump's near-universal appeal in the heartland survives his abysmal polling, the myth of Texas as a state made up exclusively of pickup-driving Republican cowboys survives its actual recent voting history. So the Times prints the vibes.