A lot of what passes for election journalism is just idle horse race speculation that probably won’t hold up over time. Just ask the journalists who produce it.
In the Sunday edition of the Washington Post (10/19/14), Dan Balz has a piece about the surprise frontrunner in the 2016 race for the Republican presidential nomination. It is—no, seriously—Mitt Romney. Why is anyone writing about how the guy who is quite adamant about never running for president again is well ahead of his rivals?
There’s a poll that says so:
The Post/ABC poll found that 21 percent of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents say they favor the Romney as their 2016 nominee. That was almost double the 11 percent who named the person in second place, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
Romney benefits as much or more from the fact that no one among the likely candidates has yet filled the vacuum he left behind. That he enjoys top billing among prospective 2016 GOP candidates says something about Romney but much more about the others in the unsettled field.
Of course, polling this early doesn’t actually serve any purpose at all, other than to give reporters an artificial narrative to help shape the campaign coverage in the months and years ahead. But that narrative has a way of falling apart pretty quickly.
At around this same time in the 2008 election cycle (late 2006), a guy named Rudy Giuliani was the GOP frontrunner, and political journalists were spending time fantasizing about the Hillary Clinton/Giuliani showdown (Extra!, 6/07) that actual voters, it turned out, weren’t so interested in. Recent history shows that the polls this far in advance tend to have no predictive value at all, and that’s even if you think that journalism about political races should spend much energy trying to predict their outcome.
Dan Balz
The thing is, Dan Balz seems to know this. So after leading with the poll results and telling readers what how much they tell us about the Republican Party, he reminds us that, by the way, these polls aren’t likely to tell us much of anything at all: “Any analysis of 2016 polls comes with the obvious caution: Given the number of candidates and the absence of a clear frontrunner, these early measures are far from predictive.” This comes rather deep into a piece concerned with speculating about the 2016 election.
Why do the Post and ABC pay to conduct these polls, and then waste resources paying someone to write about them? Who knows. Balz does think they have some value: He writes that the fact that Romney is ahead says “much more about the others in the unsettled field.”
What it actually says is that people tend to recognize the name of the guy who ran for president last time. On ABC‘s This Week (10/19/14), anchor George Stephanopoulos declared, “Look who is leading—there he is—Mitt Romney.” But conservative roundtable guests Bill Kristol and Mary Matalin dismissed the poll. Matalin responded by saying “this is an ID poll, as you well know.” In other words, the people responding to the poll know who Romney is, but they’re not that familiar with Scott Walker or Marco Rubio. And Kristol chimed in: “The four leaders of the poll are two people who’ve run before and two people whose fathers have run before.”
As surprising as it might sound, Bill Kristol’s probably right.
But if you focus far enough into the future, you can ignore all the little details of the current world. And who knows, anyone remember the Laugh-in Episdode where they Did “Far out news” and they opened with “Date line 1984, President Ronald Regean today…” That like 1968.
That was truley as hilarious as you could make it to be, and yet it didn’t make it past reality.
After William Kristol got Iraq so wrong in 2003, setting aside FAIR for the context of their wider wisdom, who could take anything the Rush Limbaugh doppelganger says, seriously? But its academic. The nutjobs in the corporate media.