Kos has a great rant up where he lays the sources of his deep frustration and anger over the outcome of this election. I can’t say I disagree with anything in the list. We should have been able to win this election, we almost did, but we came up about a week short (or a week long).
Trump won, so we lost. All of us. All the people who voted for him. The United States. The entire world.
And there’s a lot of fingers to point and a lot of actors well deserving of blame. Kos’ list is by no means exhaustive.
But one of the frustrations that Kos mentioned in his diary struck me, because I think I know the answer.
I’m angry at ME. It was easy to trust the data, and I expected it to continue working. And then it didn’t, and fuck that shit. So I built an entire narrative around what the data said, and it was wrong. And I still don’t know how else I would’ve handled it, so that makes me angry as well. I know what we must do in the future—organize with a vengeance—but when it comes to covering the election, I’m at a bit of a loss.
The first step to fixing this problem is to acknowledge that data-analytics is just a scientific gloss over the same old horse race coverage that pundits have been using to misunderstand the electorate since time immemorial.
The second step is to look at the difference in tone of the coverage of Trump since he has won the election. Suddenly all the news sources are chock-full of detailed information about people in the campaign, his possible cabinet picks, his conflicts of interest. They are covering what it means for Trump to be President. (I feel confident in saying that this change in tone and focus would have happened with Clinton had she won — it’s not all about them not taking him seriously.)
The simple fact is that there’s no reason that this exact coverage of Trump (and Clinton) couldn’t have taken place before the election. To me, this is exactly what the election coverage should have looked like all along. Obviously, you’re going to have horse-race coverage, including analytics and fancy graphics. There’s a place for that, (news is also entertainment after all).
What was missing in this election was concrete analysis of how the two candidate’s Presidencies could be expected to look as a practical matter. What would it mean for this person to become President? Who could we expect to run things? What would be their priorities? What problems/issues would they look to address? And how would they go about doing it?
Covering candidates platforms as aspirations (He wants to do this, She wants to prevent that) leveled the playing field and allowed Trump’s puny promises to be counted the same as Clinton’s detailed platform. It also allowed reductive arguments like “I don’t believe anything she says" to be effective at curtailing and derailing any practical discussion of policy.
In no way is this a criticism of this site, its writers, or the membership. This isn’t some obvious thing. Nobody was doing this. Not online, not on cable news, not in the newspapers. The coverage was all based on personalities, candidate history and the inevitable horse race.
And yes, there’s no way to know for sure what a future cabinet is going to look like, or what emergencies or unanticipated opportunities are going to shape the upcoming Presidency. But that in itself is a story worth covering in great detail. How would this person as President handle an emergency? Who would they look to for advice and who would they tap as their right-hand?
So that’s my advice on how to cover the next election and every election after that. Look away from the horse race, ease back on the campaign-trail blow-by-blow, and focus your efforts on painting the picture of what it will mean to have one of the candidates as President on Jan 20, 2021 (or as Congressman or Senator in 2019).
