New Hampshire, The Horse Race, and The Sound Byte

The Nightly News Nightmare has provided much insight into how network television coverage of presidential elections has change since the rise of alternate forms of news, mainly cable news and the Internet. This part of the book focused largely on what they refer to as the horse race and the sound byte.

However, what really interested me is the importance of the New Hampshire primary. Being the first in the season, the candidates spend a disproportionally large amount of time canvassing the state. In fact, according to Farnsworth and Lichter, approximately 20 percent of registered voters will have at least seen one of the candidates in person before they vote in the primary. It is difficult to continue as a candidate if you do not do well in this primary. In order to be seen as viable by donors, which are clearly necessary in order to continue as a candidate, a first or second place finish is necessary. It seems strange that one state should wield so much power. New Hampshire narrows the field from a crowded six or seven candidates for each party to two, possibly three major contenders that will compete in the rest of the primaries across the country. I suppose that someone has to go first, however, it seems as if we trust a small state with the very large task of significantly narrowing our field of presidential contenders.

But back to the horse race. One of the problems that Farnsworth and Lichter feel with network news coverage is their obsession with the horse race coverage of who is leading in which polls. The thing about this is that it is completely worthless. If the polls show a candidate is doing well, but he performs poorly in a primary contest, his campaign will likely suffer because of the artificial perception that the media created that he was going to win. The opposite is also true. If a candidate is trailing in the polls, but wins a primary by a landslide, the increased media coverage after this could create the appearance of an increase in support, when in actuality, the support was always there, the media was just wrong.

I do not necessarily think that reporting on polls is a bad thing. What seems to be the problem is that it is the media’s favorite thing to report on, and because of this, issue based reporting suffers. The citizens repeatedly say that what they want is issue based reporting. And alternative media shows this. Shows where citizens can call in and ask candidates questions, or debates in the town hall style continually feature more issue-based questions. What are you going to do for me? How are you going to increase my standard of living? What are you going to do to protect my city? Instead of questions about draft dodging, a 25-year-old DUI arrest, whether they ever smoked pot, and who designs their suites.

Network news has gotten better. The two elections in the new millennium have featured slightly more coverage of issues compared to the other elections since the introduction of cable news. However, there are still signs. Many more Americans choose newspapers, cable news shows, talk radio, and the Internet as their main means of getting information on the elections. The question of how long the nightly news can survive is complicated because there will always be people who only do not have access to anything else. If I live on a farm in the middle of Illinois, I probably can’t get the New York Times, cable TV, or the Internet. This leaves over the air broadcasts. For this reason I do not think the question is about longevity, but credibility.

The other thing addressed is the sound byte. The nightly news has reduced candidates to an average of an eight second sound byte. If they speak longer than eight seconds, they risk not receiving coverage at all. As Farnsworth and Lichter put it, “Expressing an idea, even a relatively simple one, in eight seconds or less is a considerable challenge. The standard television commercial, which usually has a single, simple message along the lines of “buy these pants,” uses twenty to thirty seconds to make its case—about three to four times as much times as a presidential candidate has to say “here is why you should vote for me.”” We spend more time hearing about the merits of a pair of jeans than the merits of our leaders. Clearly, this is a problem. However, until journalists care less about advancing themselves personally with mindless commentary, the nightly news will continue to provide the candidates with eight-second intervals to speak with the electorate.

I plan to finish The Nightly News Nightmare and move on to Political Parties, Interest Groups, and Political Campaigns. I have not made any progress on finding an archive of print or button ads.

Television's Influence on Political Campaigning

Switching gears from my previous reading, the Nightly News Nightmare focuses on modern presidential elections from 1988-2004. Initially, it seems as if it is not going to be as helpful as I had hoped. The authors thus far have presented information about public option surveys. It is interesting that what people say they want the news media to cover and what the news media feels is important to cover are often different. For instance, public opinion polls consistently say that American’s want coverage of the issues, while the media constantly covers the candidates as people and their correspondent’s take on this. Even though American’s claim to not be getting the information they want from the news, they still continue to watch it.

I spent a lot of time this week on a cool website, livingroomcanidate.org. This website has an archive of most presidential campaign commercials from 1952-2008. I spent a lot of time watching commercials from both Democrats and Republicans. One striking theme emerges; campaigning in the last decade of the twentieth and first decade of the twenty-first centuries has taken a decidedly negative turn. I do not mean to suggest that negative campaigning is a new phenomenon. It seems as if older campaign commercials did more attacking of issues and less attacking of the candidate’s character.

Tying in what I learned from Nightly News Nightmare, this seems strange. If American’s are supposedly more concerned with issues that affect them (ie. healthcare, defense, social welfare programs), then why have advertisements turned away from the issues? The theme for modern political ads seems to be attacking one another’s character. Obama does not have enough experience. McCain is too old to be president. Sarah Palin is a sexy librarian with no brain.

There can only be one reason that campaigns chose to run these ads; they must work. Which shows the indecisiveness of the American electorate. We supposedly care less about candidates’ extra-marital dealings and war records then about their positions. However, we are not swayed by political platforms, we are swayed by the candidate’s personal shortcomings.

I am interested to see how Farnsworth and Lichter account for this apparent hypocrisy. Do American’s really not know what we think is important in selecting our leader? Or are these public opinion polls so far off base that they are projecting falsehoods about the electorate?

I plan to continue to read Nightly News Nightmare, as well as look around for other sites that log political advertisements. As Ben Wright suggested, I would like to look at how campaign posters and buttons have changed. Hopefully I can find a sampling of this online. If anyone knows of where I could find this, please speak up. Comments are always welcome…

Four Hats in the Ring (Part II)

The second half of Four Hats in the Ring takes a chapter to analyze Roosevelt, Debs, Taft, Wilson, and to some extent LaFollette. These chapters provide much insight into these men’s personalities. Roosevelt believed that if he did not gain the republican nomination, his personal fame would carry him to creating his new third party. To an extent it did. Once the progressive party was organized, Roosevelt drew large crowds whenever he spoke. However, he himself admitted that this did not necessarily mean that he had the support of these throngs of people; it was quite possible that they were only there to see the famous former president. Roosevelt was somewhat blinded with his own ambition, however, as the election approached, he knew there was little chance he would win.

The irony in Roosevelt’s losing is how progressive his ideas really were. Wilson implemented many of them in order to gain reelection in 1916. According to Gould, almost all of them were implemented sometime in the next twenty-five years.

Then there is Taft. After securing the Republican nomination, he knew there was little chance he would win; he was not that popular. However, he refused to campaign in keeping with tradition. Considering that he did not campaign himself, his vice president was very ill and died several days prior to the election, and the split in the Republican Party, it is impressive that he garnered the number of votes that he did. Although he held out hope that he would win the election, he did not expect to.

Eugene Debs certainly did not expect to win either. His stated goal was to increase the presence of the Socialist Party. Because of this, he insisted on campaigning nationally, as opposed to concentrating his efforts in areas sympathetic to the socialist agenda. Although it may have not been the resounding success he was looking for, the 1912 election did yield the greatest percentage victory for the socialist cause.

Which leaves Wilson. As the election drew nearer, he knew that he was virtually guaranteed the presidency. However, he still introduced the idea of New Freedom as his plan for improving the country. New Freedom was just the catch phrase the Democrats needed. It gave them something to say without providing much detail of what the actual plans were. Once Wilson won the election with great majorities in both the House and Senate, he basically had a blank slate to implement whatever the Democrats wanted to.

I cannot help but draw connections to Obama’s campaign. He knew that McCain winning was a long shot, especially once the economy tanked. His version of New Freedom was Change; a nice word to put on campaign posters, but no real substance to back it up. Now that he is in office with a Democrat majority in the House and Senate, he is also trying to advance the Democrat’s agenda for the country.

According to Gould, many have said that had Taft and Roosevelt reconciled their differences and ran together, the chance of a Republican victory would have been possible. However, he does not feel this would be the case. In fact, the four completing candidates, only one with a real chance, is not what he feels makes the 1912 election modern at all. It is everything else that was going on in the country at the same time.

The presidential candidates had to compete for election coverage for the first time. The American public was fascinated with the first major organized crime trial in New York City, Jim Thorpe’s wins at the Olympics, and Jim Johnson’s controversial marriage to a young white girl. Because newspapers were able to print news from around the country, these pop culture stories would grab the public’s attention away from the election.

The trend of American’s participating less in politics is shown by the voter turnout figures. The 1908 election, according to Gould one considered particularity safe and boring at the time, attracted nearly the same number of American’s to the polls as this bitter four-way race. This seems to have begun the trend of many American’s choosing to not participate in the election of their public officials.

Overall, this book was interesting to being my study of the changing nature of political campaigns. Although it did not involve a major innovation like radio, TV, or the Internet, it seems to have singled the shift to modern elections in that American’s began to not care as much about politics. As I said last week, my next reading will be The Nightly News Nightmare by Stephen Farnsworth and Robert Lichter. Perhaps this obsession with nightly campaign updates will signal a shift back to more American’s having a genuine interest in politics. As always, comments are welcome…

Four Hats in the Ring (part I)

Gould’s Four Hats in the Ring about the 1912 presidential election has been an interesting read. One thing point that Gould makes that is that in 1912, Americans were unconcerned with war in Europe or revolution in Mexico (pg. 30). Initially this seem strange to me. Most of the elections I have been alive for have had some foreign policy component to them. People have been concerned about immigration, border control, war in Iraq or Afghanistan, and unrest in Latin America. The fact that American’s were unconcerned shows how amazingly isolationist America used to be. It also shows how presidential qualifications have changed. People argued against both Obama and Bush’s candidacy because of their lack of foreign policy experience. Clearly, in the globalized world in which we now live, American’s have become more aware of the need to take foreign policy into account when selecting a president.

Moving back to the actual election, it becomes clear that all three major Republican candidates were incredibly short sighted with their goals. Their universal problem was that they made everything too personal. Roosevelt felt personally betrayed by Taft because of Taft’s deviation from Roosevelt’s policies. Taft felt betrayed by Roosevelt’s lack of support after he helped him become president in the first place. Lafollette was only motivated by his personal desire to be president, and because of this, was unwilling to compromise.

Clearly, hindsight is twenty-twenty. However, it is impossible to see how these three candidates could not see that they were handing the election to the Democrats. In creating such deep “cults of personally” around themselves, they deeply divided their party. These divides were so deep that Roosevelt ran as a third party candidate, which sealed defeat for the republicans. I personally made connections to the 2008 Democrat primary between Obama and Clinton. Neither refused to cede to the other and deep divisions were created in the party. However, when Clinton lost, she did not bolt and create a third party. She supported Obama openly and helped to seal the election for the democrats. It seems to me that she was able to do this by compromising and not making things personal. She disagreed openly with Obama. However, she was smart enough to know that no matter how much she and Obama disagreed, the alternative could lead to a Republican victory.

Again moving back to the 1912 election, there were two important first that have shaped modern politics for the rest of the century. First, Taft campaigned for the nomination of his party. According to Gould, this was a break in the custom that incumbent presidents did not campaign for the nomination of their party. In modern elections, first term presidents begin campaigning for reelection as the incumbent almost as soon as they are elected. Unfortunately, many of the decisions made during their first term are made with the thought, “How is this going to effect my reelection hopes?”. Although I don’t agree with him, I must give Obama credit for campaigning for such controversial health care reform in his first term in office. Perhaps reelection is not the first thought on his mind, as the health care issue has cost him popularity with conservatives and liberals alike.

The other tradition, which was broken, was that of the candidates not appearing at the party convention until the official nomination was delivered. Roosevelt chose to arrive at the convention early and do everything in his power to gain supporters for his cause. He actually still had a chance of swaying delegates and getting others disqualified. There was a very real chance that he could walk away with the election. Looking at modern elections, the party convention has become a mere formality. I hypothesize that modern forms of instant communication have made this the case, however, I will investigate this further in later posts.

I hope to finish Four Hats in the Ring sometime this week and then move on to a more modern look at how the nightly news influences elections by reading The Nightly News Nightmare by Stephen Farnsworth and Robert Lichter. Comments and thoughts are always appreciated. Until next time…