Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is remarkable in one respect — his lack of major newspaper endorsements for president. Not a single newspaper among the top 100 highest circulation newspapers has endorsed the Donald. To date, his only newspaper endorsement is the Santa Barbara newspaper which offered a line that Trump was endorsed with no explanation for the endorsement.
Want to see who’s endorsed so far and who hasn’t? Here’s a list for you.
As this is the first presidential election for the Orange County Register under their new owners, and they haven’t endorsed for president in the last two elections, but their sister papers in Los Angeles, Long Beach and Torrance all did (for Obama in 2008; Romney in 2012), you have to wonder if the Register and these other papers will enter no endorsement or come out for Trump.
The Register’s Democratic endorsements are like Mountain Lion sightings — rare. Which is unfortunate given the changing nature of the county’s electorate. If only the editorial pages would read the news pages (yo, Brian Calle, you might want to read what Martin Wisckol is writing these days). Need an example? Sunday’s Register had an opinion column suggesting Hillary Clinton could win in a landslide but claim no mandate.
From that column:
“In fact, in the closing phase of the campaign, both candidates have begun to behave as if Clinton is headed for an empty triumph. Donald Trump insists on warning supporters gathered at his rallies that the election will probably be rigged, priming them for a loss. There are two rational responses to hearing your candidate prepare you to lose: give up and stay home or vote angry and disrespect defeat. In both cases, Trump supporters will look on a Clinton win as not just illegitimate but in an even deeper way disconnected from reality. Already Clinton has had to fight perceptions — such as those once dogging George H.W. Bush — that she is living in a parallel universe of elite privilege and does not understand the prevailing reality in America. Fears of right-wing civil unrest are probably overblown, but fears that the anti-Clinton crowd will look on her administration as especially weak are not.”
Clinton supporters don’t see it this way. And the notion of comparing Hillary Clinton as a child of privilege compared to Donald Trump (or for that matter Mitt Romney and George W. Bush) is delusional. Somehow, the historic notion of the pending election of America’s first woman president is already being diminished by conservatives who’ve believed the smears against Clinton’s record and lack the ability to talk with voters who admire her. Given the tone of the Register’s opinion pages leading up to this historic election, I expect the Register and other papers in its chain to not endorse anyone or strike out to please its conservative reader base and back Trump.
Should the OC Register endorse Hillary Clinton for president, I don’t see the fault lines that run through Orange County holding up under the force of all those Lincoln Club members dropping to their knees in anguish all at once. Break out the Earthquake kits.
Endorse Arturo Ferreras, the people’s candidate for District 4 Anaheim City Council.
Endorse Arturo Ferreras for Anaheim City Council District 4
The same guy who doesn’t debate and accepted Tom Tait’s endorsement. Tait endorsed Young Kim over Sharon Quirk-Silva. Does Arturo want to throw Sharon under the bus?
Scaredy Cats!