Politics & Power Quote by Sally Quinn

Quinn’s line is a neat little pressure point: it sounds like a neutral, empirical observation, but it’s really an argument about legitimacy. “Every poll” does a lot of work. It’s a sweeping preamble that implies the matter is settled, dissent is naïve, and the audience is free to move on to the implied next step: if journalists are Democrats, then coverage that harms Republicans isn’t scrutiny, it’s partisan behavior wearing a press badge.

The subtext is less about individual reporters’ voting habits than about the public’s growing suspicion that institutions have an ideological house style. Quinn is also speaking from inside the Washington ecosystem she helped define, where journalism is as much social geography as profession: who you marry, where you live, what dinner tables you sit at. The charge isn’t just bias; it’s cultural proximity. “Democrats” functions as shorthand for an entire class-coded sensibility: cosmopolitan, credentialed, urban, fluent in the norms of elite liberalism.

Context matters because the quote lands in an era when “the media” became a partisan villain, and polling about journalists’ politics turned into ammunition. Quinn’s framing is pragmatic and faintly chastening, almost as if she’s telling her own tribe: you can insist on fairness, but you can’t pretend your newsroom composition is politically invisible.

It also slyly shifts the burden of proof. If the press is presumed Democratic, every story becomes suspect by default, and the defense of reporting has to start with rebutting motive rather than establishing facts. That’s the real power of the line: it doesn’t prove bias; it makes bias the background setting.