As we noted last week, gubernatorial victories by Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey led to the killing of many trees so that the press might mull over what it all means for the Big Picture, what with midterm elections coming up next year.
Journalists are invariably seduced by the postmortem — explaining with authority why a complicated political event played out the way it did — which is a lot easier than the (yikes!) prediction, which, unless the writer covers all possible scenarios, leaves one open to the very real possibility of being … dead wrong!
Postmortems have their own pitfalls, though, the most common one being oversimplification — as the New York Times subtly proved in a short piece yesterday headlined “Candidate Cites Bad News for Bush as Key to Loss.” (More on that in a moment.)
Following Democratic Senator Jon Corzine’s sizable (53-to-44 percent) victory over Republican Doug Forrester in New Jersey’s gubernatorial contest, the press initially restrained itself from speculating too heavily that Forrester was dragged down by President Bush’s own sagging popularity.
This weekend, however, Forrester said exactly that, as Newark’s Star-Ledger reported Sunday:
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
Doug Forrester, in his first postelection interview, laid the blame for his loss in the governor’s race last week directly at the feet of President Bush. He said the public’s growing disaffection with Bush, especially after Hurricane Katrina, made it impossible for his campaign to overcome the built-in advantage Democrats have in a blue state like New Jersey.
“If Bush’s numbers were where they were a year ago, or even six months ago, I think we would have won on Tuesday,” Forrester said. “Katrina was the tipping point.”
Here was a juicy and dramatic explanation for Forrester’s loss, and the Star-Ledger understandably played it up. Deeper inside, the paper added another comment from Forrester, paraphrasing his belief that without any statewide elected officials, “the state Republican Party is as vulnerable as ever,” and that “the county organizations are virtually powerless.” The paper also included a major disclaimer from an RNC spokesman, who said the race was about local issues and that Democrats have 300,000 more registered voters in the state.
So how did the New York Times report the story? Essentially, it condensed and rewrote the Star-Ledger‘s lede, with the first five paragraphs of the Times‘ nine-paragraph article giving the resounding impression that Forrester indeed lost chiefly due to Bush’s unpopularity. The bottom of the Times story did include several qualifiers, but the last word was that, nationwide, “many Republican politicians are increasingly distancing themselves from Mr. Bush.” Quick and easy, right?
Not so fast. If the Times had taken the time (or space) to look a little closer, it could have given their readers a much fuller — and more accurate — explanation. To give a few examples:
-The Times reported on a new Star-Ledger/Eagleton-Rutgers poll, noting that “several factors may have conspired to doom Mr. Forrester,” including Bush. (In fact, the poll found that 40 percent of voters said Forrester’s link with the president affected their vote.) But the Times did not mention the key finding of the poll — that Corzine won primarily because he did a better job of turning out his base, neutralizing the advantage Forrester gained from his two major issues (property taxes and corruption) by trouncing him on the others.
-The Times could have considered that Forrester’s loss by a “wide margin” of nine points was only three points worse than the final Eagleton-Rutgers poll before the election. Furthermore, this election’s break toward the Democrat continues a longstanding trend, as we wrote last year, of major elections in New Jersey going Democratic late in the game.
-The Times could have looked at its own story from the day before, “Republicans Face Future in Disarray,” which described a weak state party on the verge of “civil war” and in need of an immediate overhaul “to avoid sliding into irrelevance.”
Fact is, the reality of Forrester’s defeat is much more nuanced than the picture the Times painted — and our interview with Murray Edelman, the Eagleton-Rutgers poll’s director, only reinforced that. “I think the Bush thing was a clear factor,” Edelman said, reiterating the 40 percent figure. But he also said this: “It was hard to say what was more important than the other [factors]. You don’t really have any causal relationships here.”
In other words, even the most accurate voter surveys remain an inexact science — and so do the simplified postmortems that journalists draw from them.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.