politics

Is the Narrative Shifting From Horse Race to Game Over?

No single story line has dominated campaign coverage this season. But recently, we've seen a shift toward highly flattering portraits of the Democrats' main players.
October 23, 2006

While it may seem like we haven’t been paying as much attention as we should to the coverage of the midterm congressional elections, the fact is it’s been a perplexing race to cover (or cover the coverage of, in our case).

That said, there was an interesting bit of analysis of the coverage this past weekend by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. Marshall wrote that “the news cycle the campaign feeds on has seemed a bit aimless over the last week. In fact it’s started to feed on itself. And by that I mean that the major campaign issue has been how badly the campaign is going for the Republicans. But that type of inverted news cycle tends to feed on itself and like a bubble, burst.”

He’s got a point. The coverage of the campaign has been marked by a series of competing claims for dominance by a number of storylines, none of which has really managed to become the story around which to wrap the coverage as a whole.

Over the past week or two however, we’ve seen a definite shift in the coverage toward running highly flattering portraits of the Democratic Party’s main players, from stories like Newsweek‘s “What the Dems Would Do” if they win next month, to 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl’s softball profile of Nancy Pelosi, to Sunday’s flattering profile of Democrat Rahm Emanuel in the Washington Post, to the Los Angeles Timesupbeat piece from Saturday, headlined “Madam Speaker? Pelosi likes the sound: In line to lead the House if the Democrats win control, the Californian brings discipline, fundraising skill — and a lightning-rod nature.”

Of course, those are just a few examples from the past couple days, but overall, the coverage has a bit of a “March on Rome” quality to it, with the Democrats being treated like a strange group of insurgents who have beaten the odds to stand, somewhat stunned, before the gates of power.

While it looks like the Democrats are indeed poised to make some major gains in next month’s election, the tone of some of these more, shall we say, energetic pieces makes some in the press look like they’re trying to get on board with the winning team — especially if you compare the recent coverage to the beating the press has been handing the Democrats over the past several years.

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Lest we forget, there is also the specter of the Foley scandal making the rounds. As we wrote a few weeks ago, it has yet to be proven in any poll we’ve seen that the scandal has actually turned voters away from voting Republican, reporters’ noise about the scandal notwithstanding. Nevertheless, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jim Rutenberg kept the myth running in the New York Times this morning, writing, “Officials are telling their friends that they believe a final volley of intensive attacks by the White House will return the party to where it was before the Foley scandal, by casting the election as a choice between Democrats and Republicans over national security and taxes.”

Yet as Pew reported on October 5, the Foley scandal was having no effect on the congressional race at that point; and looking at a variety of other polls taken since shows that while Foley’s fall has definitely had some sort of existential impact, the percentage of people reporting that they plan on voting for Republicans or Democrats has remained largely unchanged over the last several weeks.

Which leads us to the conclusion that while the scandal hasn’t done the Republicans any favors (Foley’s Florida district, for one, went from comfortably Republican to a probable Democratic pickup), the upshot of all this is that the midterm coverage — which always skewed in favor of the predictable “horse race” narrative we see each election season — appears to have jumped the shark from a wait-and-see approach to a preemptory celebration of the coming Democratic majority. And whenever that happens, like in 1994, we are likely to end up with an unclear picture of what really happened out in the local districts, in favor of grand — and often overly simplified — narratives about the atmospherics surrounding the complicated process of electoral politics.

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.