To the great detriment of my mental health and overall well being, I follow midterm elections very closely. This year was especially taxing on me because my dad was ill and my spouse Lori Palmeri was running for Wisconsin's 54th assembly district seat. Dad passed in late October. As for Lori, her race turned out to be highly contentious. Thanks to the Wisconsin Republican Party the state's legislative districts are among the most gerrymandered in the nation, leaving no more than a dozen (out of 99) assembly districts that can be called truly competitive. The 54th happens to be one of them, and so I had to watch defamatory attacks on Lori featuring partisan ferocity usually reserved for candidates running for US Senate, Governor, or President. Thanks to her hard work knocking on doors and the support of dozens of spirited volunteers, she won the race. But as a sign of how fucked up our politics have become, her opponent never called to offer congratulations and told the Oshkosh Examiner that he lost not because of his own shortcomings or that maybe all the nastiness backfired, but because the voters apparently "want to hire a criminal." Class act right there. [Note: Lori's alleged "criminal" past was thoroughly vetted by local media. People of good faith understood that her story of surviving a childhood and young adulthood filled with abuse that nearly killed her was in fact a story of great courage and character. Only bad faith actors, like the partisan hacks who produced the attack ads, would conclude that Lori's past should define her as "criminal."].
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What I described four years ago has become, by any measure, substantially worse. Here are some of the most painful templates of the most recent campaign season.
*The Hack Template: The Hack Template refers to the tendency of establishment media to treat purely partisan attacks as if they are legitimate contributions to campaign discourse. In 2016 Donald Trump became a master of manipulating this tendency of the press; screeds against "Low Energy Jeb" or "Little Marco" would end up as feature segments on the talking head shows and get commented on by so-called "serious" pundits. The schtick caught on: It's not an exaggeration to say that competive elections have now become little more than expensive exercises in trolling.
The Fourth Estate should be the firewall preventing the trolls from polluting campaign discourse. Yet mainstream Wisconsin journalism rarely reports on candidates without making as part of the story some cheap-shot trolling by the opponent. Especially in a social media era in which false or misleading information gets shared across multiple platforms instantly, one would think that ethical, rigorous journalism requires vetting attacks before publishing them. That does not happen in mainstream Wisconsin journalism, probably out of fear of offending the political king and queen makers in Madison. Meanwhile the television stations are more than happy to broadcast horrific troll ads for the right price. It's really pathetic and outrageous.
*The Will S/he Drop Out of the Race Template: This is a template that is doing substantial harm to the Democratic Party. I trace it to the presidential primaries of 2016, when Bernie Sanders faced enormous pressure from Party operatives to drop out of the race before all states had held their respective primaries or caucuses. Since then it has become somewhat of an article of faith among establishment Democrats that candidates who "don't have a shot" at winning (presumably because they do not have high poll numbers, do not have huge personal fortunes, or have not successfully tapped into the wealthy donor base) should just drop out.
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| 2022 Democratic candidates for US Senate invited to debate: Mandela Barnes, Sarah Godlewski, Alex Lasry, Tom Nelson, Steven Olikara. Only Olikara, who could not break double digits in the polls, stayed in the race until election day. |
Unfortunately the mainstream media adopted "will s/he drop out" as a template for campaign coverage. In the 2020 presidential primaries, all of the so-called "moderate" candidates (Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and others) spent the final months of their campaigns mostly commenting on whether or not they would stay in the race. Eventually they all bowed out to "clear the moderate lane" for Joe Biden.
In Wisconsin in 2022, there were a number of talented candidates running for US Senate on the Democratic side (Mandela Barnes, Tom Nelson, Sarah Godlewski, and Alex Lasry were the most prominent). For some reason, the Party establishment in Washington immediately latched on to Barnes as the preferred candidate. By primary election day every major candidate had dropped out except Barnes. The lack of a truly competitive primary ended up seriously hurting the Barnes campaign, as it reinforced the illusion that the Lt. Governor had already locked up support among constituencies that Democrats have to do well with to beat the GOP in a close statewide election. Tragically, voter turnout in Milwaukee in November was down substantially from 2018. It's pure conjecture on my part, but I firmly believe that if the primary candidates had remained in the race, that would have mobilized a higher primary vote in Milwaukee (and other areas of the state), which would have ultimately benefited Barnes in November. (Note that Evers/Barnes won the 2018 election in spite of the fact that few of the primary challengers dropped out before primary election day.).
*The "Some People Think the Ads Are Racist" Template: Senator Ron Johnson and his campaign flacks insisted with a straight face that their ads run against Mandela Barnes were primarily about highlighting differences between the candidates on the issues of crime and the economy. To me that sounded as if D.W. Griffith, maker of the most racist film in history ("The Birth of a Nation") had said that the film was about different perspectives on how to rebuild the south after the Civil War. A film critic writing about Griffith's film who did not acknowledge its portrayal of the KKK as virtuous heroes and African-Americans as predatory buffoons, or could only muster up a tepid "some people say the film is racist," would be rightly castigated as incompetent or perhaps racist him or herself.
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| Even though the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published photo evidence of the GOP's willful darkening of Mandela Barnes' skin tone, the racist nature of the ad campaign was still framed mostly as an accusation made by Democratic partisans. |
Establishment journalists in Wisconsin were not comfortable calling out the blatant racism in Johnson's ads. Take the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which headlined a story by two of their most prominent political writers like this: "Supporters of Mandela Barnes accuse Republicans of airing racist ads in Senate race with Ron Johnson." "Supporters accuse" implies that the racism in the ads is somehow up for debate. This in spite of the fact that the most prominent of the ads linked Barnes to three women of color (AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib) seen on the screen while Barnes is labeled "different" and then "dangerous." Other ads show a person committing a crime circled in red while Barnes' name is on the screen in an obvious attempt to link the two. And of course some of the ads darkened Barnes's skin in a way designed to make him appear more threatening to a certain type of White voter. No one denies that Mandela Barnes' positions on crime or any issue are legitimate topics for campaign ads. But the aesthetic of these ads were despicable in their deployment of subtle and overt racism. The ads actually reminded me of the late Senator Jesse Helms' "Hands" ad run against his African-American opponent Harvey Gantt. Helms and his cronies insisted the ad was merely about the candidates' positions on racial quotas. But clearly it was a racist attempt to frighten White voters in North Carolina.
*The "Wave" Template: Is it finally time to retire the "wave" metaphor when discussing midterm elections? In 2022 the wave template, which dominated establishment media coverage of the election season for months, never seemed to have any basis in reality. While polls were showing that Democrats would lose seats (as is the norm for the Party that controls the White House), never did any reliable poll suggest a blowout. In fact the idea of a "red wave" seemed to come primarily from the Republican Party itself. For reasons that are not clear, the establishment media took a GOP talking point (i.e. "2022 is going to be a Red Wave year") and made it one of the dominant framings of the campaign season.
Even if there had been a Red Wave, the volatility of the electorate this decade could easily give us a "Blue Wave" in 2026 or 2030. It's long past time to retire the Wave metaphor.
*The High Stakes Debate Template: In theory, debates between candidates competing for votes should be a valuable part of the election season--perhaps THE most valuable. A real debate provides engaged voters with clear evidence of whether or not candidates have a compelling message, can communicate their thoughts coherently, and (especially in the this era of Trump-endorsed candidates) are grounded in objective reality.
Mainstream media enjoy promoting candidate debates as some kind of "high stakes" event that will make or break the election. Debates are framed as boxing matches, in which candidates aim to score a "knockout blow." Consequently, the debates become nothing more than an extension of the trolling found in the candidate ads and other campaign communications. In fact in this social media age, the main function of the debates is to produce "viral moments," which are usually clips of a candidate saying something profoundly stupid, or making an odd nonverbal gesture, or "owning" his or her opponent. If the Kennedy-Nixon debates occurred in a social media age, Nixon's 5 o'clock shadow would have had 90 million shares by midnight.
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| Arizona Democratic candidate for Governor Katie Hobbs (left) refused to debate her Republican opponent Kari Lake, claiming that Ms. Lake was only interested in "spectacle." Given that Hobbs won the election, we can probably expect more candidates in the future to refrain from debating. |
Even though today's political debates are largely a sham, I still find it unfortunate when candidates refuse to participate in them in the probably naive hope that we might be treated to some substance. It's especially troubling when Republican candidates refuse to debate not out of any concern with promoting troll culture, but because they think the League of Women Voters and other debate sponsoring organizations are part of some liberal conspiracy.
Arizona's Katie Hobbs, the Democratic candiate for governor who ultimately won the election, refused to debate her opponent, former TV broadcaster Kari Lake. While I believe Hobbs should have debated, her reasons for not doing so were at least rooted in opposition to troll culture. She said that a debate with her opponent would be fruitless because "Kari Lake . . . has shown that she is not interested in any kind of substantive conversation, she's only interested in creating a spectacle." For anyone who watched Lake's primary and general election campaigning, it's hard to disagree with Hobbs. (Note: As I write in late November, Lake still refuses to concede, confirming what she said in the campaign about how a loss for her could only mean that cheating took place. Does that sound like someone who deserves to be invited to a serious debate? I think not.)
Mainstream media need to stop promoting debates as if they are literal fights. That kind of "high stakes" framing encourages the kind of spectacle Hobbs refused to participate in.
*The Horse Race Template: The horse race template is like the curmudgeonly great-grandfather of all the others mentioned. It conceives of election coverage as an insider baseball affair filled with nonstop coverage of polls, campaign strategy, and "moments." It enables and empowers the Steve Bannons of the world, who infamously said that the way to deal with media is to "flood the zone with shit." Indeed, the Bannon shit strategy is why so many pundits anticipated the "Red Wave." Mainstream media gave credence to and reported on junk polls (i.e. "shit") that suggested a Republican landslide. Media hungry for horse races ate it up, like Secretariat grazing on grass planted in manure compost. (Read NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen's 2018 thread on the citizens' agenda for an alternative.).
In conclusion, maybe American politics is so inherently awful that it will inevitably produce pain for anyone who dares to monitor it. But this post really is not about politics as much as journalism. Political journalists have choices in how to cover campaigns, but consistently make choices that enhance the pain. Some will argue that the coverage templates I am describing are merely a product of the commercial pressures faced by modern mainstream media. But if that is true, what evidence is there that these templates actually increase rates of viewership, readership, or listenership? None that I am aware of. If anything, these templates are furthering the decline of political journalism. That's tragic, because we've never needed fresh, principled, rigorous political journalism more than we need it now.
