It is still amazing to me that in a world of 24hr news cycles, 7 days a week, on multiple channels; with 25 million viewers of the 3 legacy news casts; along with declining but still pervasive newspaper distributions, supplemented further by the websites, blogs, RSS feeds, news aggregators and email distributions of "new media" - that the same stories get repeated, ad nauseum (heard enough of Britney and Jamie-Lynne Spears?), while information of real importance is seeming lost in the sea of pabulum.
In this environment, news casters, supposed journalists, pundits and other members of the "chattering class" glom onto the most easily digestible news sound bites. This coalescence forms an informational black hole conveniently known as, "Conventional wisdom". Important information must fight against the pervasive pull of this media monolith.
Submitted for your approval:
Debate Audience:
Conventional wisdom, repeated nearly nightly for the last year has well anchored an assumed distaste into the collective American mind against the "too-long" primary process. Yet, with a little digging from a obscure tool called "Google", one can find out all sorts of interesting information whereby to gauge voter distaste for the "too long" primary campaign.
Early Debates generated 2 million viewers each. This is about what Fox News, the leading cable channel by nearly all measures, generates nightly for "Special Report" with Brit Hume.
The most recent debates hosted by ABC and Fox News attracted: 16.7million and 2.6 million viewers respectively. When rebroadcast on CNN, the ABC debates captured 2.4million viewers.
That's 16.7million on a Saturday night (for Democrat and Republican debates) and 5million on Sunday night for just the Republicans (since Dems are still lurking in the shadows from arch-conservative, Chris Wallace.
Let's add a bit of perspective to this. The Allstate BCS National Championship Bowl Game generated an audience of 16.2million.
Audience of Primary Debates = National Championship in College Football.
Somehow I’m just not convinced the American electorate is backing down from the responsibility to seriously vet candidates for Commander in Chief.
Wyoming:
Conventional wisdom, myopically obsesses over the entrenched, exalted importance of Iowa and New Hampshire in rocketing candidates into the stratosphere of popularity and inevitable party Nomination. Yet, the citizens of Wyoming dared to hold their GOP caucuses dangerously early. In fact, they had the audacity to actually hold their votes PRIOR to New Hampshire.
Wyoming Republicans voted overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney. How much media time was invested in covering this clear and sizable win? Absent conservative bloggers, this was the victory heard around the Romney home and that's about as far as it reverberated.
Interestingly, Wyoming could have sourced some interesting facts for further analysis of the Primary process. For instance:
Wyoming's electorate is 62% Republican. Provides a very different electorate for analysis of the GOP field from the electorates of Iowa (30%) and New Hampshire (30%).
How did voters from this Republican electorate express themselves?
67% Romney, 25% Thompson and 8% Hunter.
Some alternative analysis I would expect to have heard - but didn’t:
- Mitt Romney: Wins a convincing Majority of the vote 67% - even with a packed field of 6 candidates. This is HUGE in Presidential Primaries, but I heard hardly a peep.
- Fred Thompson: When being evaluated by a deeply Red electorate, Thompson takes a solid 2nd place.
- Mike Huckabee: Despite the promised Iowa surge (just 2 days prior), Mike Huckabee's zeal for political converts doesn't touch the more secular Republicans of WY.
- McCain and Giuliani: Both presumed at some time by conventional wisdom to be GOP front-runners, both fail to even register on the vote board in a solid conservative state.
Delegate Counts:
Conventional wisdom equates 2nd place in the early primaries with a loss - unless, of course, one was polling in 4th place or worse. Finish early primaries in a disappointing 2nd or 3rd place and the despairing candidate must withdraw from the race or face certain humiliation and presumed personal ruin (queue music from a Lifetime movie and pass a Kleenex). Missing from this analysis, however, is the fact that party nominees will be selected by delegates won, not states won. In many cases, the two are partially mutually exclusive and delegates votes trump state ballots every day.
Granted, the occult workings of Party delegate rules defy explanation within a 1-minute news segment, but let's face it, the general concept of a delegate vote rather than a winner takes all system, even without the wonkish nuances, could make for understandable broadcast journalism. I dare propose that our highly literate populace could grasp the general concept. Yet, conventional wisdom continues to harp incessantly about the important of "winning" Iowa and New Hampshire - not the importance of building a coalition of delegates.
Would it be nice to win states? Absolutely! But just look at most other democracies in the world? They all deal with Parliamentary systems where no candidates or parties win a decisive majority. Do they curl up in the corner and lament their loss? No. They build a coalition through the power bestowed upon through their PLURALITY of the vote.
The GOP field officially has 5 assumed "First-Tier" candidates. The notion of particular candidates having to win all early states is moot. In this crowded field, candidates must win enough to keep excitement among supporters and, in a larger context, attract enough votes (2nd and 3rd place finishes) to coble together a decisive coalition of GOP Delegates.
This is how the entire world does elections. Seriously. I dare think that at least one of our media mega-houses could figure out a graphic, jingle and banner scroll to get this point across.
I recently proposed, half jokingly, to a politically savvy friend that purhaps someone like Romney could come in 2nd in more states than he does 1st and yet build the largest coalition of delegates. The folks RedState have done the hard math.
What's key here is that in terms of the Delegate count, there's good reason to forecast a Romney victory and a convincing path for the other 4 front-runners. It turns out this is the simple wisdom of Karl Rove as well:
At the end of Super Tuesday, it won't be just who won the most states, but who has the most delegates.
Absentee Balloting:
Conventional wisdom, in an incredibly tight and turbulent race, explores how the results from one race will affect the next race - one successive race at a time. Missing from this elementary perspective, is the fact that early balloting has begun in states which may vote much later. Absentee ballots in Florida, for instance, equate the totality of voters in Iowa caucuses.
The fact that absentee balloting often predates prior primaries is "pert near" completely missing from most news coverage. This is why possessing an organization and funding prior to the Iowa caucuses was so important this year. Romney's organization has been mobilizing absentee voting in New Hampshire and Michigan since December. Giuliani has been pursuing absentee, pre-balloting in Florida for all of January. The preferences of these early voters is captured around dynamics when these candidates were ahead in the polls.
How often have you witnessed this fact being clearly explained and intelligently pursued in primary news coverage?
To put the importance of absentee voting in Florida into perspective, consider that the more than 325,000 Democrats and Republicans who have requested ballots comes close to the number of Iowa voters last week who -- with hundreds of media outlets recording their every move -- trooped to schools, libraries and churches to support their favorite candidates.
Conventional Wisdom is a gapping maw form which little light emerges. I hope these thoughts help shine a bit light into the Twilight Zone of established media.
On Principle,
CBass
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