This is their major, well-documented, take away, but the conclusion was not what has made Identity Crisis The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America valuable to me.... her campaign 'likely contributed to [2016's] heightened racial consciousness.' 'As a result,' she wrote, 'some white voters may have decided I wasn't on their side.'
If for nothing else, I'd urge interested activists (and others) to consider two points that stood out to me in this book.
Many of us had a completely inadequate understanding in 2016 that any Presidential election after an incumbent from either party has been in office for eight years is going to be something close to a toss-up. I know this was not part of my thinking. After even a successful presidency, there will be pent up grievances and pressures and room for demanding some change. These authors conclude that Obama's strong approval ratings and the good economic conditions probably predicted something like "a 72 percent chance of a Democratic [Clinton] victory -- a real, but hardly definitive, advantage." A lot of us leaped from an intuitive sense that this was the case to a misplaced confidence that Clinton would certainly prevail over the manifestly weak Trump candidacy. Pollsters interpreted their own data in the same light; Nate Silver has maintained plausibly that the polls weren't so much wrong as that too many of us failed to look at them realistically.
Sheer volume of media coverage enabled Trump to dominate the Republican primary race; he just crowded out the rest of them. Trump was such a ratings draw that the TV networks sometimes covered his rallies (circuses of hate, I'd call them) even when nothing was happening. The authors describe the general principles:
... nominations often present a challenging task for voters. There can be lots of candidates, some of whom are familiar only to political cognoscenti. How then is a voter to know which candidates are "good"? Which candidates have adequate experience? Which candidates have beliefs that a voter shares? Which candidates can win the general election? Voters need information to answer these questions, and the news coverage helps to supply it.
... Candidates who meet standards of "newsworthiness" garner coverage. Because news coverage of campaigns typically focuses on the horse race -- which candidates are winning and losing, their campaign strategies, and the like -- candidates will earn more coverage when they raise large sums of money or do unexpectedly well in prediction polls or early primaries and caucuses. News coverage also features events that are novel -- such as when a candidate first announces his or her candidacy -- and episodes that make for good stories, with compelling characters and conflicts. When candidates succeed by any of these metrics, even if they have been largely ignored to that point, they will be suddenly "discovered" by media outlets and, therefore, by the public. Their poll numbers will increase ...
Does that description of a primary seem familiar? It should. We're in precisely that phase with the Democratic hopefuls these days. I am reading current 2020 coverage through a lens very much informed by this insight about media influence from Identity Crisis.
For example, here's a snippet this week from Thomas Edsall:
Will this move the polls? Will a lot of media attention bring more? We'll see. FiveThirtyEight has published an informative graphic showing how much coverage each current Dem aspirant received from their kick-off.G. Elliott Morris, a political data reporter for the Economist, noted on Twitter that O’Rourke has received more cable news coverage in the five days since his announcement than any other candidate during the full post-announcement week. O’Rourke is on a path to get 180 percent of the coverage received by Bernie Sanders, the previous leader on this measure.
Or this from political scientist Brendan Nyhan:
He's on to something there. The journalists need to shape an attention-grabbing story out of whatever politicians offer; they will flock to the off-beat and the bizarre. Then more coverage leads to more coverage ...With most candidates’ speeches and rallies generating relatively few headline-worthy sound bites, reporters and commentators often instead turn their focus to theater critic–style assessments of a candidate’s strategy and campaign skills. In its most dangerous form, this form of coverage centers on manufactured narratives about a candidate’s personality. These narratives often center on whether the candidate is “authentic” — a media construction that ignores the reality that all candidate behavior is strategic.
A reporter new to covering politics offers some revealing reflections from Iowa on the experience of following candidates in the early stages:
Out of such as this are winners chosen. Not only this, but very much this. I'm sometimes skeptical of academic political science; is it really science? But I'm finding Identity Crisis very much applicable to our current moment.Voters listen to candidates differently from the way reporters do. I can see why people who cover these events regularly start to get cynical or at least start to tune out the message. After hearing it four times, even I could probably repeat Harris’s stump speech by the end of that day. But what I didn’t realize until I got here — and should have, and hope to remember — is that everyone in the crowd is hearing those speeches (and most importantly, those jokes) for the first time. I’ve probably heard Harris say Americans need to base policy on “science fact, not science fiction” about 15 times. But the elderly man in front of me in Ames still chuckled when he heard it Saturday night and elbowed his wife, who did the same.
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