Media Election Coverage – Turn-Out Levels Are Critical

New York Times headlines on Biden’s troubles.

LET’S TAKE A BREAK, shall we, from American media’s most intense preoccupation, as evidenced by yesterday’s supposedly crucial, but inevitably inconclusive White House press conference?

I of course mean a break from the Democratic Party’s restiveness and confusion over their President being or not being the best person to articulate his own record in office and lead them into victory, re-installing him in that office.  

Instead, for now, I want to look at this Year of Elections overall.   2024 began with the media beating the drum to announce what was called “the biggest election year ever.” That was true globally— though some of the more isolationist American outlets were applying the label to only the US. True globally, in that an unparalleled number of 70-plus countries would be holding national elections this year, with a total of roughly half the world’s adult population going into the voting booths at various points between January and December.

Now that we’ve passed the year’s half-way mark … how are the results looking to the media?  Voting in just the past couple of weeks has brought tumultuous drama and upheaval internationally, enough to excite even the most blasé of globe-trotting reporters.  I can cite the upheavals of the United Kingdom … in France … and even in, dare I say, a country that’s hardly renowned for its democratic processes: Iran.

France and Iran don’t have much in common – though we could recall that Ayatollah Khomeini spent years preparing the revolution that would make him Supreme Leader of Iran from a base just west of Paris. What the two countries have just displayed in two rounds of voting (both countries held two rounds) was possibly best described as the “spook factor”. Not in the meaning of spying, but of scaring, and being scared.

In France, the first round of voting raised, very seriously, the alarming prospect of a lurch in the National Assembly toward the extreme right, in the shape of the National Rally party, which was previously the National Front, the longtime home of Nazi sympathizers. That first round ended with National Rally taking the lead, looking poised to win the most Assembly seats of any party, and three times as many as it previously held.

This definitely spooked the nation, and swiftly a tactical coalition of necessity was created, between a broad-left alliance and President Macron’s more centrist party, which in the end – at the second round of voting –  beat the far-right down to third place. It was a surprise victory by the left and center parties, confounding many pessimistic predictions in the media, about the extreme right being dangerously close to taking power.

PEZESHKIAN (left) & JALILI (right)

Meanwhile in Iran, first-round spooking happened when the people’s evident choice crystallized between a hardliner, Saeed Jalili (far right) and a reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian (right). “Reformist” is of course a relative term in establishment Iranian politics. After recent years of increased repression, much of it centering on brutal enforcement of women’s headscarf-wearing laws, Pezeshkian actually campaigned on a promise to relax that enforcement. Jalili for his part promised what he called “strength” and his campaigning generally emphasized greater national security. In the second round Pezeshkian won. An analyst with the International Crisis Group defined the choice this way:

“Votes for Pezeshkian were not so much out of hope for the better, but fear of the worse with Jalili:

Significantly the low turnout in the first electoral round, of only 40% – the undeniable sign of a jaundiced population altogether – surged substantially to 50% in the second round, and that certainly helped the reformist to win the Presidency. Nobody could claim this improved turnout was any kind of rousing endorsement for the entire electoral process, still less confidence in the system of government as a whole, where the current Supreme Leader has way more power than the newly elected President …  but it was a telling response to the choice available to the Iranian people at this point.

In France’s case, the turnout for the second round surged to sixty percent – a level not seen since 1981, and a 20-point leap compared with the last Assembly election.

SO THE “SPOOKING EFFECT” WAS A MAJOR engine for increased electoral participation in both France and Iran. The instances of low-trending turnouts, which got shaken into abrupt change only by some rude awakening to a looming political emergency, should make us ponder America’s status in this regard.

Voter engagement in the U.S. has long been regarded among international analysts as unimpressive, with its voter turnout in the late-twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, hovering at percentages that ranged through just the 50s and low 60s.

But … and this is a serious, significant, and fair recent but … the American elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 were three of the highest-turnout elections for decades in their respective category, general and presidential … or mid-terms.

About two-thirds (66%) of eligible Americans turned out for the 2020 presidential election (the first Biden-Trump contest) – and that was the highest rate for any national election since 1900. The 2018 election (with a 49% turnout) had the highest rate for a midterm since 1914. Even the 2022 turnout, with a slightly lower rate of 46%, exceeded that of all midterm elections since 1970. We can certainly see the effect of a political emergency registering with the American electorate

THIS COMING WEEK WILL SEE TRUMP himself brought under more media scrutiny again, as the Republicans crown him in their Milwaukee Convention. And when I say scrutiny – I hope to mean real scrutiny – along with an abandoning of the media’s double-standard that’s been at work so far. A full court press over Biden’s evident weaknesses, as opposed to almost haphazard coverage of Trump’s form of mental degeneration.

It’s too easy for the media to dismiss Trump’s ramblings as crazy and a bit weird  … for instance, those extraordinary, self-involved imaginings of his, while onstage at a Las Vegas rally, that he’d invented a method for electrocuting to death a killer shark, claiming some kind of expertise because he has a remote connection, via a now-deceased uncle, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was not merely weird – it was (to cite that especially acute monitor of Trump, the Atlantic magazine) a visceral demonstration of a mind that is “deeply unwell.”

Let’s hope the Republican Convention prompts the media in general to fully carry out their job of close scrutiny.  And maybe they’ll help to produce – down the road four months from now – a meaningful surge in voter turnout, with the American electorate fully awakened to just how momentous, how much of an emergency, their choice is this year.