Covering elections like a horse race

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), August, 1996

As if they were calling a horse race, election season pollsters and pundits provide their daily insight as to which candidate is out front, who is trailing the pack, and who is stumbling. Critics of such journalistic practice say that the coverage of issues suffers, and voters don't get what they need, as they did in the good old days. Their memories are dim, though.

Not only has horse-race journalism been around nearly 170 years, "there never was a golden era of political journalism," maintains Thomas Littlewood, a journalism professor at the University of Illinois. "The conceptions that some people have, including some academics, that there was a golden age of very lucid, penetrating, informative, issue-based journalism in the past is not true."

In the 1820s, supporters of Andrew Jackson conducted the first straw polls. They would take unscientific surveys at rallies and social events friendly to their cause, then report the favorable results to partisan newspapers to get them published. It wasn't "circulation-grubbing newspaper editors" who instigated those first straw polls, Littlewood points out, but politicians seeking a way to get Jackson, their presidential candidate, noticed by the political establishment.

Although the use of that type of poll died out, the interest in the horse race never did, says Littlewood, a former campaign reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. "Once we had a system of competitive elections, the thing about elections that people were most interested in is who is going to win.... Anybody who knows anything about the dynamics of news knows that this is the big story."

Certain aspects of American culture and history have aided that interest. One of those is the love of gambling. During one stretch beginning in the late 19th century, "newspapers devoted a lot of space to `news' of the wagering odds and the volume of bets [on election outcomes], as though the professional gamblers somehow had insight into the voting behavior of the American people."

Another influence has been sports. "Many political journalists began their careers in the sports departments. Once commercial sports began to flourish at the end of the last century, politicians and political reporters knew that they could compete for public attention only by emulating the language and many of the cultural features of sports."

Horse-race journalism probably will always be around, Littlewood feels. "Really at the heart of all this is the collective interest that journalists have in a good story," and the campaign race provides that. "But what happens now, and it need not happen, is that it drowns out everything else."