By Chris Satullo
Democracy getting you down lately?
Understandable. But here’s a hopeful thought:
No matter how dreadful the presidential campaign gets, you might still be able to have a good election.
Wait .. what?
Here’s what I mean. Let me share a useful distinction I first learned decades ago from a former Knight-Ridder Newspapers colleague, Buzz Merritt, a founder of the movement known as civic journalism.
Campaigns, Buzz used to say, are what candidates – and their gaggle of high-priced consultants and self-important aides – do.
Elections … well, the only people who can hold an election are the voters themselves. The election is a rolling conversation carried on by tens of millions of voters – in their own heads and with one another across work cubicles, backyard fences, diner tables, barber chairs and fitness club treadmills. It continues over many months, punctuated by two moments of decision and action, one in the spring, then the big one in November.
Buzz’s point back then, which got him figuratively tarred and feathered in some media circles, is that we journalists were fatally addicted to covering the campaign – the polls, the mud-slinging ads, the tactics – and pretty much sucked at covering the election.
We too rarely covered politics as though our main mission was to seek out the voices of and serve the needs of voters – the real actors in an election. We too often treated the horse race as the be-all and end-all, while relegating the good of the nation to a secondary, mostly tedious concern.
I wrote that last paragraph in the past tense. But, a thousand breast-beating, post-election journalism conferences later, the syndrome is still very much alive today. How else to explain the early free ride that enabled Donald Trump to storm the GOP primaries in 2016? How else to account for how much of the political press missed Trump’s energizing of millions of previously disengaged voters, fueling his upset?
And nothing much has changed this time around. The 2020 presidential campaign shapes up to be even more frenetic, Twitter-toxic and poll-obsessed, with the media coverage even more breathless and cynicism-inducing.
Bad election coverage creates cynical voters. I had the chance a couple days ago to interview Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the pre-eminent academic analyst of political discourse. She spoke about ground-breaking research she did years ago about the impact of political journalism that stresses the horse race, tactics and polls over issues and positions.
She said such stories leave voters more cynical, more likely to label candidates as pandering or corrupt. What’s more, voters tend to forget the issue substance those stories often do offer, albeit near the bottom. Jamieson and her team of researchers did experiments where actual election stories were recast to stress issue content and downplay the horse race. Voters exposed to those revised pieces did far better at remembering issue content and ended up more enthusiastic about candidates and voting.
So what is the answer for the poor voter who’d rather not be pulled down into cynicism and despair?
Well, no one person can cure deeply embedded journalistic habits. Many people have tried – including me for many years from inside the castle, and Kathleen from outside, flinging her careful data over the battlements – but only to sporadic effect.
Still, here’s what you can do. You can vow not to let the campaigns – and the slavish coverage of them – drag you down into cynicism, hysteria or apathy.
You can focus on your election – that is, your chance to think through your values, your hopes and concerns for their nation, your vision for what this nation should be and do. You can feed your mind through substantial journalism and good conversation with friends and neighbors. Then you can hold the candidates up to your inner light and evaluate which one comes closest – in character, judgment, experience and ideas – to what you seek.
That is your personal election. It is your privilege and your job.
This will mean breaking some habits. A person at that recent event asked Jamieson how they should interpret the polls. Her response: Don’t. Ignore them.
What she meant, in part, is that polls do nothing to help you answer those salient questions of your election – and will distract and depress you away from doing the work you could be doing as a citizen who has an election to decide.
I’ll also suggest that ignoring polls will help you stop obsessing about the chimera that haunts this moment: the notion of “electability.” The last election does not predetermine the next – and no one has yet pinned down what really turned things in 2016. All we have are flat opinions, most from people who don’t understand what the polls did or did not say in 2016 and barely understand how polls work anyway. And who often have a bias about this election that they are looking to prop up with theories about the last one.
Try this instead: Focus on finding the candidate whom you think will do the best job of leading America – and trust that the qualities you find there will prove as a good of measure of “electability” as any numbers from the latest Quinnipiac poll.
Despite my somewhat exasperated critique of my journalist tribe, the fact is, a lot of solid reporting on issues and candidate records is being done. (There’s also a horrifically swelling mound of propaganda and falsehood. Learning to sift the nourishing data from the toxic sadly has become a pressing duty of citizenship.)
You’ll find plenty of the solid stuff on newer digital sources like Vox, and from old reliables like The New York Times and The Atlantic, which have gained a new sense of mission inside Trump’s America.
You can learn a lot, think a lot, converse a lot, clarify a lot what you want and what you believe during this election of yours, if you only try.
Now, finally, let me acknowledge the objection you’ve been screaming in your head as I’m talking. Yes, our ultimate choice on the ballot will be shaped by many huge factors over which we have little or no control: eviscerated campaign finance laws, the smug carelessness of social media companies, the creaky primary system. All these may indeed conspire to present you on Nov. 3 with a choice you deem less than optimal.
But your job as a citizen is to make the best choice you can from among the options. Perfection is never on the ballot. Your worst options are staying home or making your choice out of pique, whimsy or ignorance.
Elections are decided by millions upon millions of such individual choices. You can’t control what the media or Facebook or Russian trolls do. But you do control your choice and how you prepare for it.
So please, try hard to have a good election, no matter what else happens. The work and thinking you do will equip you to understand better and respond more effectively to whatever the next four years will bring.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.