A telling statement from the focus group

The media doesn't focus on issues that matter to everyday people

Undecideds liked Trump, but does it matter?

Frank Luntz is one of the premier focus group hosts. His people have never been shown to be anything other than undecideds. They generally represent some of the few people who vote for candidates over Party. The buzz of the night was that Trump did a better job explaining his positions and was surprisingly Presidential. Meanwhile, Biden was described as elusive, defensive, and vague. He was also said to come across as old and "grandfatherly".

But I think it's important to understand that Joe Biden (right, wrong, or indifferent) did not go into this debate to aggressively appeal to undecideds or to provide any real specifics. One has to assume that Biden is still "running out the clock" and cares more about holding on to the potential voters they probably feel that they have locked up, rather than winning any new undecideds. Biden's goal was likely to not "rock the boat" or to simply look the part of competent alternative.  Other than talking about phasing out natural gas and oil, which was a mistake, Biden was probably mostly successful in these regards.

But I think it's telling that there seems to be a growing frustration among independents with how the media is handling politics. It's no longer just Republicans who take issue with the main stream media, it's the everyday non-political American who is now growing tired of the media attempting to "control" what it is that we should care about, talk about, and how we should judge our politicians. 

It's one thing for the mainstream media to nearly completely ignore the Hunter Biden situation, but it's quite another to see social media quite literally censor any of the stories off Facebook and Twitter. The fact that we spent nearly three years listening to the media drone on about the so called Trump Russia collusion conspiracy, when in the end there was literally no truth to it, makes their decisions to "censor" what we hear about Joe Biden all the more hypocritical. 

One of the problems is that there doesn't seem to be much alternative anymore. Tucker Carlson and other conservative Fox news hosts dominate prime time,with Carlson many times beating out the network television shows for the same time slot. But even Fox News is changing everywhere other than the prime time hosts, bringing more and more liberals to add "balance" while CNN, MSNBC, and others offer nothing in the way of balance. 

The almighty dollar has seemed to be replaced with the almighty sense of partisanship. Liberals who own and run the networks would rather use them to influence. They seem to care little about being objective or even make money. There is no question that Fox still outperforms everyone, and that if another conservative network came along, it would instantly become more successful than the existing networks. People are itching to hear both sides of the story, and right now almost nobody is telling it.