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Horse Races and Presidential Campaigns Angel Colquitt 1 Horse Races and Presidential Campaigns Angel Colquitt, Sheridan King, Anisah Muhammad Dr. Black, Dr. Cummings, and Dr. Grant Journalism, Political Science, and Communications Special Topics April 3rd, 2020 2 Imagine that you are watching a football game on your television but the scores are not displayed. Not only are the scores absent, but after the game is over, there is a delay in results. The referees have to do a manual count of each team’s touchdowns, field goals, and safeties. It takes days to find out if your team won. Now, apply that scenario to the 2020 Iowa caucuses. Football, of course, is a sport. The United States presidential election process is not; or, rather, it shouldn’t be. Yet, the way that many media outlets cover the election cycle, termed “horse-race” coverage, is similar to the way sports are covered. Horse-race coverage has become the primary way that media outlets cover presidential elections. By analyzing the role horse-race media coverage has played in the past and the consequences it has had, we can ascertain the dangers it will play in the future of both politics and journalism. Before we dive deeper into the subject matter, we must first define the meaning of “horse-race coverage.” Horse-race coverage is coverage that “focuses on poll results and relative party standings, rather than, for instance, substantive treatment of election issues” (Matthews et al 2012), and it focuses on “which candidate is ahead, which candidate is behind, and what strategies the campaigns are employing to win the election” (Jones 2016). Horse-race coverage portrays the presidential election process as a competition with clear winners and losers. Aspects of reporting on the competition include negative campaigning, agenda setting and personality coverage. It also includes placing policies on the backburner to instead focus on poll results and candidates attacking each other. According to Kathleen Kendall, a political campaign communication researcher, the reason the media favors poll results is because they suggest a level of objectivity and precision, and they help structure coverage. Front-runners in the polls, Kendall notes, receive the heaviest coverage (Kendall 2000). Whether the candidates talk about 3 their policies or not does not seem to influence the proliferation of horse-race journalism. For example, during the days leading up to the 2020 Iowa caucuses, Sanders and Warren talked about what they were going to do, policy-wise, while Biden and Buttigieg mentioned their plans in a roundabout way. Nevertheless, the coverage of those days became “this person attacked that person” and who was more primed to win in Iowa. In some ways, candidates and the media have a two-way relationship, where the media feeds the horse race, and the candidates feed the media with interesting content. Kendall quotes other scholars in calling the relationship a “competitive symbiosis in which each side is dependent on the other for needed services but each tries to obtain those services while incurring the least amount of cost” (Kendall 2000). One reason for at least national media outlets to focus on poll results and a candidate’s attack strategies is because they are more distanced than local media. From observation, local media does a decent job of covering the policies and plans that candidates talk about at their rallies, which results in citizens of that locality being more informed about candidate stances than the rest of the country. Even so, it is the collective that votes in a president, not the minority. Still, horse-race coverage continues to influence the modern election cycle, and it has done so for many years now. People started using the term “horse race” in reference to the competitiveness of politics as far back as the late 1800s, according to Merriam Webster. In some ways, horse race coverage evolved with the evolution of both the presidential election cycle and media technology. By 1912, several states were using primary elections as the first step for candidates to obtain delegates. Newspapers, especially the New York Times, placed emphasis on covering primaries (Kendall 2000). Kendall describes that during the 1912 election cycle, the Taft campaign had massive coverage and the Roosevelt campaign was vilified. Furthermore, she points out that 4 even though polling did not exist at that time, “campaign staff and newspapers estimated candidate popularity, voter support, and delegate strength freely and frequently. Competing claims and counterclaims about likely voting results were always in the headlines, and elaborate estimates were made of the size and relative enthusiasm of each candidate’s crowds” (Kendall 2000). By 1932, many states stopped relying on primaries, and while the bulk of press coverage focused on what the candidates were doing and how many delegates they were winning or losing, “many of the same articles contained short discussions of the parties’ and candidates’ positions on policy issues” (Kendall 2000). By 1952, media grew to include not only newspapers but television, radio, newsreels and newsmagazines, all of which covered the 1952 primaries (Kendall 2000). With the rise of presidential primaries and media technology came negative campaign tactics. Kendall writes that negative campaigning was birthed because of the multitude of candidates in the primaries and the resulting need for those candidates to differentiate themselves as the good one. Both candidates and journalists started relying on negative campaigning. Candidates relied on it in order “to define a personal image” and to differentiate themselves and journalists to identify the “best fighter” in the primaries (Kendall 2000). This process is a precursor to the way candidates attack each other today and the way journalists cover those attacks. Horse-race media coverage was in full-fledge by the 1972 presidential election cycle, and it soon gave rise to new tactics. Kendall uses Walter Cronkite as an example. When referring to the California primary in 1972, Cronkite said, it had “long been recognized as the big ball of wax, the winner-take-all race for 271 delegates” (Kendall 2000). It was also found that images published in newspapers and weekly magazines showed the nomination process as one in which 5 violence was the norm (Kendall 2000). Furthermore, the focus on poll results intensified. By 1992, with the rise of television, agenda setting, the process of influencing public opinion, also rose. Media set the agenda as to which primaries were important, which policy issues were important and which candidates were important (Kendall 2000). Two political scientists, Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder, conducted an experiment to test the power of agenda setting through television news. They found that people who were shown network broadcasts that drew attention to a certain problem placed greater importance on that problem than they did beforehand and than people that were shown different problems did (Farnsworth and Lichter 2010). The symbiotic relationship between the media and candidates also continued, as candidates sought to set their own agendas and to influence the public through the media. In recent years, horse-race coverage has allowed certain candidates to use that relationship to their advantage. In the words of Kendall, media outlets are influenced by one, personal characteristics of candidates, two, fighters against the odds and three, candidates that are skilled at influencing media coverage (Kendall 2000). The 2008 presidential election had candidates that fit all three of those categories. According to Suzanna Linn, Jonathan Moody and Stephanie Asper, “The 2008 presidential election, more so than any previous campaign, was presented as a horse race between senators Barack Obama and John McCain. .The media did not cast the election as a debate about issues. Rather, the 2008 election was about the candidates' relative positioning, how they got there, and what strategies they would employ to secure victory” (Linn et al 2009). As in the past, the rise of new media strategies and technologies could explain the proliferation of horse-race coverage in 2008. Then senator Obama heavily used social media during his campaign, and traditional media started relying on daily tracking polls. Furthermore, based on Kendall’s three points, Obama, particularly, appealed to horse-race 6 coverage because of his personality, his “fighter against all odds” disposition and his use of social media to influence public opinion. While Obama may be seen by many as a “good” outcome of horse-race coverage, perhaps the real consequences of such coverage did not come until the 2016 presidential election cycle. For many, the results of the 2016 presidential election cycle show how anyone can become president, regardless of their history in politics. To some, the election showed how there will always be a chance for a true underdog to swoop in and win despite what others think of them. But make no mistake, regardless of political alignment, the 2016 election cycle showed how one candidate could tactically use the horse race coverage that the media relied on in order to win an election. Donald Trump took advantage of the ways in which the media underestimated him in order to gain momentum and ultimately win the election. From the first reports about Trump’s candidacy, it was clear that the media underestimated him. Comparing the first NPR article announcing his candidacy to the article announcing the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, the assumption that Trump would never make it far in the election cycle is obvious. Clinton’s article is filled with accolades, featuring links to her YouTube, tweets, and even where the reader can find more coverage on her candidacy. Meanwhile, the article covering Trump’s candidacy includes a single photo and a link to a listicle. To add insult to injury, the article about Trump for NPR features a typo in the third paragraph.
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