Blue and Red All Over: Election Coverage in the United States
Too often, political journalists fight the last war.
By looking at what happened in the last election, we can underplay or miss events and trends that will determine the outcome of the next. For example, the conventional wisdom in American politics right now says that the 2004 presidential election is going to be a close one. That's based on the early national polls showing a close race and the fact the 2000 election was close. But I can make a case that this election could just as easily be an electoral blow-out for either George Bush or John Kerry.
Any incumbent president has enormous powers to influence events. At the same time, Kerry leads Bush in early polls in some key states like Florida and Ohio and has some big issues working toward his benefit. While my brain tells me this will be close, my gut tells me to forget 2000. This could just as easily be like 1980 or 1992, elections in which well-liked challengers knocked off unpopular sitting presidents who have developed images as fumblers. Bush still has a chance to turn this into a 1984 type of election, but his hopes of doing that are growing remote. Instead he must rely on making John Kerry "unlikable" to many Americans. His has become a wearisome presidency. It features wars on terrorism and job loss and those are hard things to turn around in a few months. Even if the economy does improve, it'll take time before voters start to feel it. And just last week, all the good news in the stock market this year was wiped out almost overnight by terrorist attacks in Spain.
Since more and more voters decide later and later what they're going to do in a voting booth, it's likely to be several months before one scenario or another becomes clear. There are several reasons why this election may not be like 2000. Things like:
What is the political fallout from another terrorist attack on the U.S.? Last week's attacks in Spain illustrated how this can and probably will happen. Even an attack on another country meant the stock market gave up - in a few days - all the gains make in three months. Americans are jittery about terrorism. What if something similar happens here? Does the country rally around the incumbent as we've done in times of past national crises? Or do Americans blame the president for allowing the attack to happen on his watch? Or is it a bit of both? We simply don't know and none of us has any good reference points or polling data to make projections about it because nothing like this has ever happened to our country before. We are in uncharted waters here.
As the unprecedented outsourcing of jobs overseas continues, it is causing more anxiety among American workers who don't seem to see much coming back in return. (Perhaps economists can see it but a lot of other people can't and there are more of them who vote than there are economists.) I remember Pat Buchanan joking to reporters during one of his campaigns that if the jobs of the Washington bureau chiefs of major American papers could be outsourced to Taiwan, they'd have a different view of the issue. While there's no danger of that happening any time soon, more and more Americans see the outsourcing issue cutting closer and closer to home and it's hurting Bush. On top of all that, hard-pressed workers are starting to see gasoline prices rise. Just ask Jimmy Carter what that does to a re-election campaign.
The new campaign finance laws are creating new ways for money to have an influence in politics. Like water on a flat roof, big money always seems to find a way to leak through to politicians. At the same time, Howard Dean's pioneering use of the Internet showed how small donations can still be amalgamated into large war chests. Both are new tactical factors in this election and both could have an impact on the outcome. Part of the story of this campaign will be which candidate or party did the best job playing these new money games in American politics.
There are more Latinos and more African Americans in the electorate. Bush strategists have been quoted as saying that if these groups vote in the same percentages as they did in 2000, Bush would lose the popular vote by 3 million votes instead of just half a million. Democrats understand this well and are expending new resources to find, register and turn out those new voters in key states.
Kerry has done a good job mobilizing Vietnam veterans in his bid to capture the Democratic nomination. Can he repeat the feat on a larger scale for the general election? Veterans have had a large impact on American elections in the past. (Union veterans in the Grand Army of the Republic elected American presidents for about 30 years after the Civil War. World War II veterans helped elect Eisenhower over Taft in 1952. Perhaps Vietnam veterans are about to elect one of their own this time. Bush faces a toxic combination: A lot of veterans are the same folks who are most worried about trade and the outsourcing of American jobs. In recent presidential elections, white males have been voting Republican. The question for this election is whether Kerry can break enough white male voters away from Bush and the Republicans to tip elections in those close, battleground states.
Kerry's a smart, articulate guy. He'll mop the floor with that bumbling, inarticulate Bush, right? It's possible. But the last time around we heard that Al Gore would do that to Bush, too, and it didn't turn out that way. Bush came off as more genuine and likeable. If Kerry reverts to his image as cool and aloof, this is one place where the 2004 campaign may be like 2000. Old-fashioned likability counts for a lot more in politics than we sometimes like to admit. Remember, too, Midland, Texas is a lot closer to the average American than is Nantucket. The bottom line here is there are lot's of new, unpredictable variables that make this election different than 2000 but just as hard to predict. At this early stage of the fall campaign, news organizations would do well to park reporters around a bunch of kitchen tables in the toss-up precincts of toss-up states. (And maybe put a few in VFW halls in Ohio, too.)
Forget the road shows and rallies. Can we "embed" a few reporters with undecided voters or new minority voters for the next few months to add a little meat to all these poll numbers? And maybe even give us some early signals before sentiments show up in survey data? Journalists covering this campaign need to know in human terms how issues of terrorism, Iraq, trade and gasoline prices are playing out with a handful of real - but very undecided - people, the key people in battleground states that will determine the outcome of the 2004 election.
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