On Tuesday, November 3, voters around the country will go to the polls to elect officials in a variety of races. These campaigns, known as the “off-year elections” because of the absence of regularly scheduled federal contests, are mostly obscure. But a few of them—the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and (especially) Virginia, and the House race in New York’s Twenty-third Congressional District—have been endowed with broader significance; the outcomes there will be analyzed and interpreted as symbols of the national political mood and tests of “the Obama agenda.” For reasons John Sides lays out briefly here, these analyses will be mostly meaningless. The sample is too small, the factors that drive election outcomes are too complex, local conditions are too variable, and our knowledge about voters’ motivations is too limited to draw any real conclusions.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that the political press is eager to assign meaning here where none may be warranted. But what’s aggravating about this situation is that reporters will frequently acknowledge the limitations of what these off-year elections tell us about national politics—and then happily speculate about their meaning nonetheless.
A case in point is Adam Nagourney’s Oct. 12 story for The New York Times, headlined “Two State Races May Put Lens on Obama.” Nagourney wrote:
Off-year elections are prone to overinterpretation, and governor’s races tend to be determined by the quality of the candidates and local issues rather than national politics; overcrowded highways are the biggest topic this year in Virginia.
But that was immediately followed by the story’s central claim:
For all that, Virginia, a laboratory for many of the ways Mr. Obama tried to change the ideological appeal and tactics of his party, is looming as an early if imprecise test of this president and his policies.
Nagourney returns to the same terrain today, with a news analysis headlined “Outcomes of Off-Year Races May Provide Insight” (“may” being one of several useful hedge words here). One of the opening paragraphs reads:
Off-year elections are typically the subject of frenzied discussion and overinterpretation by political observers — though rarely, it seems, as frenzied this year, a reflection of the heightened interest in politics created by Mr. Obama’s rise.
But soon enough, we see some of that overinterpretation first-hand:
At the very least, the results in the governors’ races, if not predictive, are quite likely to drive the political narrative, bolstering or diminishing Mr. Obama’s political stature as he seeks to rally a divided party. The outcome could, to a limited degree, help measure whether Mr. Obama’s success last year was a phenomenon limited to him or the early signs of a long-term Democratic resurgence.
Other examples are plentiful. According to the Associated Press, “the outcomes [of tomorrow’s races] won’t predict next year’s midterm results.” But that didn’t stop the AP from running a long story predicated on the idea that “the McDonnell-Deeds outcome [in Virginia] will be a key measure of how America feels and, perhaps more importantly, how independent voters are acting ahead of the 2010 elections.” And the pattern isn’t limited to American journalists. The Times of London recently ran a story that included the sentence, “The impression of an Obama brand poisoned by the politics of the past nine months is probably false, however.” But that acknowledgement didn’t stop the paper from headlining the piece, “Obama set to lose first election test in Virginia’s governor race.”
One of the most interesting cases of this phenomenon is Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic, who has helpfully anticipated all the post-election spin, offered warnings about the limits of analysis, and even asked: “[I]s it possible that the political community will over-interpret the consequences? Most certainly.” But even as he is warning about the perils of overinterpretation, Ambinder seems unable to resist it. Today, he tweeted that a special election for a vacant state Senate seat in Michigan—which sounds like the very definition of a low-turnout, low-profile race that will turn on candidate quality, campaign quality, and local issues—is a bellwether to watch.
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It has been sounding in the media--heard and read--that too many people have too few things to talk about so they run into the ground the voting on 3 states of the East Coast. Or like summertime yellers--too easy!! Even BBC news carried them. WHY?? Too many are forgetting that voters vote mostly by their pocketbooks at the time of the vote. So Obama gets slammed constantly about being too slow in foreign policy and too much unemployment. Everything seemingly must be done NOW or yesterday!! Of course!! Independents start to say they maybe shouldn't have voted for Obama, Do they really think they would prefer McCain and Palin??? He'd have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan before September this year. To him the more the merrier! We'd mos tlikely have had fancy parties with sex, drugs and liquor in the back locked rooms--just as there had been for the oil companies in 2006(??)on our tax money. Media needs to get into other items more often and more thoroughly. Telling people once about something 20,000 miles away doesn't work. Only a few know where and what happened. Too many reporters have too little experience outside NY or DC and need to do more in more places. If BBC can afford it, so can ours. The management needs to cut their salaries and the reporters need cheaper hotels. No one knows how to scrimp and save anymore and so they cry over 5% cuts in salary but can't understand why too few people pay $800 annually for a 7-day newspaper. With CDO's there was one article on how they worked 15 months before the fall in 9/08. How did they cause or help to cause the fall--no one mentioned until Obama was in office. They mentioned NOTHING about the risks involved, the illusion of wealth, the fraud implicit in too much risk. I'm no business person but I did tell my son after I read that article in NYTimes near Easter to hold off on buying a house. Too much money was flying around and no one was in control. Too likely that prices of homes would drop. I had to be general since I knew very little but that huge amounts of money with little or no recording had to be dangerous. It doesn't work well with a checking account, it can't work well with CDO's. But NO ONE in daily media could bring this out. One person Dr........? (nickname) mentioned it in either Harpers or Atlantic Monthly. But how many people in business or politics read them???
#1 Posted by Patricia Wilson, CJR on Tue 3 Nov 2009 at 06:37 PM
What has the headline on this story got to do with the text? The word "cliche" doesn't even appear in the story.
#2 Posted by DennisCMyers, CJR on Fri 6 Nov 2009 at 11:47 PM