Commentary: Election year has arrived, and while I do not bother much with new year resolutions, I will renew my pledge to avoid describing election campaigns as races, unless the candidates are facing off in a contest of athletic skill.
It is not just that the metaphor is inapt and erases debates about policy, principle and effective leadership, but ultimately it erases democracy. The winner of a race does not need a mandate from the people in the stands. Fans may have a favorite runner on the track, but the result is not up to them.
Portraying elections as races relegates voters to the role of spectators. Although votes formally determine elections, the focus of political coverage lingers on the influence of money and advertising, the number of donors, who has backing from the wealthy, which all presumes the election will be determined once the investor class and television commentators advise you who is viable. You are the mob and need to be led.
Thus, voters get less information than they deserve and their role in representative democracy gets short shrift. Concerted efforts, sometimes admitted out loud, to stymie voter registration and make voting more exclusive, difficult and expensive, are often covered as routine partisan disputes, rather than as attacks on marginalized people and as attempts to game elections.
This is despite a tendency for political journalists to refer to voting as “sacred,” positing some sort of state religion.
Story after story rests on polling data, testing candidates' "likability" and seeking a forecast of the election’s likely outcome. It deliberately confines serious consideration to the two dominant political parties and, within that set, to candidates who appeal to an “ideological center” to broaden their appeal. This is a system that constrains imagination and choice. It elevates mediocrity.
Alternative parties, and even primary challengers in the dominant parties, are vilified for introducing competing ideas, as if running for office were an attack on democracy rather than its realization. If we valued elections as trials rather than races, in which platforms and leadership qualities were compared and debated for voters to decide, campaigns and news coverage would have to change.
As the Pew Research Center has reported several times, the demographic with the greatest influence over the 2016 election of Donald Trump was nonvoters. “Tens of millions of registered voters did not cast a ballot in the 2016 presidential election, and the share who cited a ‘dislike of the candidates or campaign issues’ as their main reason for not participating reached a new high of 25 percent,” Pew reported.
Nonvoters were determinative in 2016, yet editorial boards and pundits demonstrate scant interest in them, and the two parties are content to play tug-of-war with a few voters in the middle rather than engage masses of alienated citizens.
Meanwhile, multiple studies have shown that the best investments campaigns can make, as far as turning out voters, are in high-quality field campaigns — not just knocking on doors and hanging literature on the doorknob, but having unscripted, personal conversations with voters. This is not, however, what enriches campaign consultants.
“Successful turnout interventions also seem to have lasting impacts on individuals,” Vox reported, “leading them to become lifelong voters, as well as on their cohabitants. But to take advantage of these innovations, campaigns need to seriously increase their focus on field.”
If the legitimacy of representative democracy were a value, “sacred” or otherwise — if this were really about you — the present state of affairs would be intolerable. As it stands, the professionalization of politics, and most of its news coverage, amounts to voter suppression.