As Usual, Shallow JournalismThis blog, which views its constituency as the worldwide solidarity movement of people with the N1303K mutation on Chromosome 7, supports the presidential candidacy of Illinois Senator Barack Obama. But you don't have to be an Obama partisan to be annoyed by the typically glib and superficial way the results of the New Hampshire primary were reported this week.
Here's the classic formulation, from Manchester Union Leader political reporter John Distasio: "Hillary Clinton's upset win after being written off by the polls and national media set the Democratic race on an entirely new course."
A variation is this smug assessment from the Concord Monitor editorial page: "New Hampshire voters think for themselves. With just five days between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, pollsters, pundits and even the candidates themselves worried that voters here would be unable to resist the wave of support for the Iowa winner - particularly on the Democratic side - and simply rubberstamp the early results. But - surprise! - the last-minute circus was no match for the full year of cogitating that voters had already committed to this race."
Even the Monitor's January 9 headline -- Democrats Pick Clinton -- was self-serving and misleading.
Here's what really happened. Although pollsters and self-proclaimed "political junkies" (a truly noxious phrase, as if politics were a narcotic that a sober person would strive to avoid) decided that because Obama won the Iowa caucuses, he would sweep to victory in the New Hampshire primary. But when the primary votes were tallied, Clinton actually emerged with more votes.
Specifically, Clinton got 39 percent of the vote, while Obama took 36 percent. Former North Carolina senator John Edwards lagged behind, finishing third with 17 percent of the vote. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson came in fourth, with 5 percent, followed by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich with 1 percent.
Lost in the shuffle is the fact that Clinton and Obama go to the convention this summer with exactly the same number of New Hampshire delegates committed to them. In this sense, they tied. And that, of course, is the only sense that officially matters -- since a primary election, unlike a delegate selection, is a delegate-choosing exercise and not a contest that results in someone winning office.
Indeed, since the New Hampshire primary doesn't actually decide anything other than delegates, a more nuanced view of the results would focus on the fact that Clinton and Obama emerged as candidates of roughly the same level of public support, with Edwards significantly behind and everyone else of no consequence. (Thus Richardson's subsequent decision to drop out.) And the relevant question, as one ponders whether Clinton or Obama will ultimately be the nominee, why 22 percent of the electorate chose Edwards or Richardson as opposed to Clinton or Obama. In other words, if your subject is the success or failure of the Obama campaign, in New Hampshire or ultimately, analysis should focus on Obama vs. Edwards and Obama vs. Richardson, at least as much as Obama vs. Clinton. Or, for that matter, on Obama vs. GOP primary winner John McCain, since they were the serious contenders for the independent voters who got to pick a party affiliation on primary day.
(Another aside about glib reporing: It is not true, as everyone seemed to report, that independent voters get to vote in the New Hampshire primary. In fact, New Hampshire law simply allows voters to register in a political party right at the polls. This registration persists unless the voters change it, which town clerks seem to allow right at the polling place. Such a practice turns political parties into a farce. If we don't want to continue to have political parties, we should stop using them as instrumentalities of semi-final election rounds.)
Analysis should also focus on the primacy effect. This is a recognized phenomenon, which comes down to the fact that candidates whose names appear closer to the beginning of the ballot tend to fare better than those whose names appear later on the ballot. In this year's primary, the candidates' names were listed alphabetically -- Clinton, obviously, way before Obama on the list of approximately 20 Democrats. (What actually happened is that, under New Hampshire law, a letter is randomly drawn as the top letter -- this time it happened to be Z -- and thus the alphabet for purposes of this primary was ZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY. But there were no "Z" candidates.) The salient fact is that every ballot in the state was identical. Formerly, they varied precinct by precinct, which tended to avoid the primacy effect in statewide elections.
The other big subject, of course, is the now-endemic inability of polls to predict election results. This, at least, is something the feeble press has noticed. The cause is intuitively obvious: a huge portion of the electorate can no longer be reached by phone. With any luck, this will lead to the demise of the polling industry altogether, which will surely redound to the benefit of democracy. It's polls, after all, that generate all the "horse race" coverage of elections, with its attendant focus on campaign tactics as opposed to issues.
Look, I like Hillary Clinton as much as many of her supporters do. Senator Obama didn't begrudge her right to claim victory in New Hampshire and neither do I. How splendid it would be to watch callow frat boy George Bush stand there at the inauguration and watch this particular woman take the oath as our first female president. But both the New York senator and the Illinois senator, as much as anyone else, deserve thoughtful, perceptive and nuanced coverage of how they did in New Hampshire. We didn't get it.
What's so great about it anyway?
And that's just the first reason that the sacred cow should be slaughtered once and for all. I refer to the myth that the New Hampshire primary is a sancrosanct political ritual, a time-tested brand of so-called "retail politics" that deserves to be perpetuated even as the evidence mounts that it is fundamentally unfair to the other 49 states.
My point is that it isn't even good for New Hampshire. Why? Because there is a finite amount of political energy in any given place, and all the primary fuss takes people away from the important business of state politics. Trust me -- I am at the New Hampshire State House all the time these days -- it really matters who your state senator and your state representative are. Even in a state like New Hampshire with a constitutionally 'weak' governor, the chief executive wields enormous power. Nobody would say New Hampshirans shouldn't care about whether Judd Gregg and John Sununu should continue to represent a state that grows ever more blue in the U.S. Senate. But the New Hampshire primary only takes caring people away from those subjects. Worse, it sets them against each other (as they divide themselves among the respective presidential camps within the party) and thereby sows mistrust and resentment. Enough already!
The cynics among you may be tempted to observe that I live in Vermont and not New Hampshire. But I am on record as having had this opinion during the seven years (1999-2006) I was a New Hampshire resident, during which time I voted in two New Hampshire primaries. I recall sharing my view with my state senator, the principled and intelligent Peter Burling. He pointed out that the primary brings a lot of money into New Hampshire, by which he meant money donated by the presidential candidates to the campaign funds of state politicians. It's an interesting argument, but you'd have to get an economist to convince me that this is a net gain. After all, every dollar I donate to Barack Obama (which he then turns around and gives to my state senator) is a dollar I didn't donate to my state senator directly.
At least we can trust the machines!
Consider the following excerpts from last weekend's New York Times Magazine article about touch-screen computerized voting machines from technology reporter Clive Thompson:
One might expect computer scientists to be fans of computer-based vote-counting devices, but it turns out that the more you know about computers, the more likely you are to be terrified that they’re running elections.This is because computer scientists understand, from hard experience, that complex software can’t function perfectly all the time. It’s the nature of the beast.
When invisible, secretive software runs an election, it allows for endless mistrust and muttered accusations of conspiracy. The inscrutability of the software — combined with touch-screen machines’ well-documented history of weird behavior — allows critics to level almost any accusation against the machines and have it sound plausible.
And the original, left-wing opposition to the machines in the 2004 election focused obsessively on Diebold’s C.E.O. proclaiming that he would help “Ohio deliver its electoral votes” for Bush. Those fears still dominate the headlines, but in the real world of those who conduct and observe voting machines, the realistic threat isn’t conspiracy. It’s unreliability, incompetence and sheer error.
Case closed, as far as this blog is concerned. New Hampshire and Vermont both use optical scanning technology -- which, as Thompson points out, is established and trusted. It creates the all-important paper record of voters' votes. This is one question that can and should be put to rest.
Not to put too fine a point on it, and at the risk of causing offense, I ask in all earnestness: Can you really see the people from the IT department of your workplace being left in charge of the fundamental instrument of democracy? I sure can't.
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