When journalists speculate about ‘electability’ we risk getting it wrong. Worse, we risk warping the debate and biasing voters
As campaigning in Iowa enters the home stretch, the Democratic candidates for president are finally at the starting gate, and mixed horserace metaphors are everywhere. Over the weekend, it felt as if today’s caucuses in the state – which typically are an all-consuming story on their eve – were themselves in a race for media attention, nosing out in front of Trump’s impeachment, the coronavirus, the Super Bowl, and other big stories. We heard about candidates’ “jockeying” – “for an edge” and “over notions about electability” – and that “the horse race has overtaken policy as a focus right now”. And that was just in the New York Times.
On Saturday, the handicappers in the political press waited for an update on the running: the final Des Moines Register poll of the cycle. (The poll, conducted by local pollster Ann Selzer, has traditionally been a useful guide to the result; ahead of its planned release, David Weigel, of the Washington Post, called it “an event of nearly religious importance”.) Then, a shock stumble: the poll was pulled at the last minute, after a respondent informed Pete Buttigieg’s campaign that Buttigieg had not been offered to them as an option. The Register wrote in a note that “while this appears to be isolated to one surveyor, that could not be confirmed with certainty”; CNN, which was also involved with the poll, said it was scrapped “out of an abundance of caution”. Lis Smith, who speaks for Buttigieg’s campaign, praised both outlets for their integrity, as did prominent journalists like Art Cullen, editor of Iowa’s Storm Lake Times. Still, the cancellation left a hole in CNN’s schedule; it had planned to give the poll an hour of airtime. (As the data guru Nate Silver noted, planning to obsess over a single poll for so long is silly, for reasons that go far beyond unexpected technical problems.) CNN wasn’t the only outlet to be inconvenienced. Sunday shows on other networks appeared to have been blindsided, too.
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Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
