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Will Newspaper Endorsements Come To An End?

Walt Rubel

Commentary: A story by Business Insider in the days before the 2016 election reported that more than 240 newspapers in the country had endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, while only 19 endorsed Donald Trump. Several newspapers that had been solidly Republican every year since their founding broke from the party for the first time in history.

None of which mattered on election day.

On Friday, the Sun-News editorial board met with Gavin Clarkson and Monty Newman, two of the Republican candidates seeking to replace Steve Pearce as the representative for Southern New Mexico in the U.S. House of Representatives, to begin the process of candidate interviews for our endorsements to come.

It is our intention to sit down with all the local and statewide candidates in elected races during the next three weeks. The one exception is judicial races. We stopped doing endorsement editorials on judges because we don’t cover courts enough to make an informed decision, and interviews with judicial candidates are a lot more restricted due to limitations as to what they can discuss.

The candidate interviews are one of the most enjoyable parts of the job, and also one of the most stressful. That is especially true in local races, where we attempt to interview all of the candidates at the same time. We try very hard to have a productive, respectful conversation where everybody has the opportunity to be heard and we stick to substantive issues.

Information gathered during these interviews does more than just guide our endorsement choices. It also provides the foundation for our news reporting on each race.

Our goal is not to tell voters who to pick. Rather, it is to present as much information about the candidates as possible, both in print and online, so they can make their own choices.

Editorial endorsements can be part of that process. We explain our reasons for coming to the conclusions we do. And, we believe that our opinions are well informed.

But I have never based my vote on an endorsement, whether it was from a newspaper or anyplace else. And I certainly hope that voters will see the endorsements, along with all of the other reporting, as tools for them to make their own decisions.

There are some who question whether newspapers should make endorsements at all. They argue that taking a position on the race taints the straight news coverage. As always, we hope that people understand the difference between news and opinion.

And, newspaper endorsements are a longstanding tradition. The Five Thirty Eight political site notes that in 1860 the New York Times threw its weight behind “Mr. Lincoln, of Illinois, familiarly known as ‘Old Abe,’ age 51, height six feet seven, by profession Rail-Splitter.”

I’m not sure if the Times helped put Lincoln over the top in his race with James Buchanan, but in the past newspaper endorsements have played an important role in elections. I’m not sure if that’s true anymore.

No winning candidate (and few losing ones) has ever received less editorial support than President Trump. Certainly, Trump is unique in a lot of ways, and many of the accepted rules of politics have simply not applied to him. But, I think it goes beyond that.

The days of newspaper editorial may be coming to an end. I have mixed feelings about that. But for now, there’s another election coming up, and another batch of candidates to learn more about. The process is always fascinating.