I periodically argue that as much as liberal media bias drives conservatives batty, it periodically turns into a serious hindrance to Democratic candidates.

The morning after Election Night, I wrote:

The mainstream media’s coverage of American politics is so often so indistinguishable from cheerleading for the Democratic Party that Democrats never actually have a good, reliable, realistic sense of how they’re doing. As I wrote a few days ago, Democrats hate self-scouting and can never take a clear-eyed look at how they’re doing: “Instead of self-scouting, Democrats walked around in a fog of optimistic happy talk.”

A few days ago, Democratic strategist Lindy Li offered CBC News a spectacular example of the phenomenon; apparently, at least one high-level Harris campaign official completely believed the late Des Moines Register survey that had the Democrat ahead, and either sincerely believed that Harris would win Iowa, or wanted others to believe it.

During an interview, Li stated:

Honestly, I don’t mean to cast blame on anybody else, but I asked DNC officials, “are we going to win this?” I even looked somebody in the eye and asked, “are we going to pull this off?” And they told me, “yes.” Someone even told me, “we’re going to win Iowa.” And I gave them a weird look. But he was insistent. This is someone high up in the campaign, telling me that we would win in ruby-red Iowa. So, I thought they were privy to internal data that I simply wasn’t seeing. And people were just exuding confidence.

This year, Trump won Iowa, 56 percent to 42.7 percent. It wasn’t even close. Nor was there much reason to think Iowa would be all that competitive outside of the outlier of the Ann Selzer poll. Trump won Iowa in 2016, 51 percent to 41 percent, and he won it again in 2020, 53 percent to 45 percent.

One of the most basic jobs of anyone running a political campaign is to know how your candidate is doing. As I wrote before the election, Democrats are largely incapable of self-scouting — “looking at a team’s performance with a gimlet eye and being brutally honest in assessing what’s going well and what isn’t.” With cheerfully oblivious strategists like this, Harris never had a chance.