The political media loves to cover politicians making gaffes, but at the end of the day they don’t really matter at all.
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Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein made a great point the other day. Despite the political media’s obsession with covering politicians’ gaffes, they don’t really have a major impact on the outcome of elections.
The post was prompted by the explosion of coverage over a Democratic candidate for Senate in Iowa who made a gaffe a few months when he implied lawyers make better politicians than farmers. This laid dormant for a while until earlier this week when some journalists decided it was a huge story. In fact one journalist declared it was a force so powerful it will have to be regulated by the EPA (no I have no idea why John Dickerson writes things like that). While other journalists on the gaffe beat focused on a campaign advertisement by Republican Senator Mitch McConnell’s that featured the Duke basketball team.
Massive political hyperbole aside, this sort of coverage isn’t very helpful when it comes to trying to figure out who will win a specific election. As Bernstein puts it:
But in high-profile races—hotly contested Senate elections, for instance—gaffes bob on the surface of a vast sea of information. The more attention an election generates, the less important any particular gaffe becomes. And just as studies have found that the effects of campaign ads fade rapidly, any effect from a gaffe is likely to disappear swiftly.
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad freeAre there exceptions? To the extent that reporters in the “neutral” press observe a series of gaffes, they may highlight that vulnerability in stories about a candidate; that could have electoral effects. Similarly, if a particular gaffe underscores a pre-existing story about a candidate, it may encourage reporters to repeat that story more often. And if a gaffe is so horrible that same-party candidates and opinion leaders feel obliged not only to condemn the gaffe but also the candidate, then it certainly will matter. (If you pull all these threads together, you basically have the story of former Representative Todd Akin of Missouri.)
That’s pretty much spot on. After all, the whole guns and religion thing didn’t exactly doom Obama, any more than the whole “Goddamn America!” thing did.
This raises the whole question of why the political media loves to focus on gaffes so much. It’s helpful think about supply and demand here. From a supply side writing about gaffes and such is much easier for journalists than diving into the world of the intricacies of public policy. Furthermore a lot of reporters seem to think that the only way to really portray objectiveness is by being hostile to politicians. So covering gaffes is a great way to prove you are objective, not some hack. Meanwhile there is a big demand for coverage of these sorts of gaffes. Remember most people who follow the political media closely are partisans who have already picked a side. So gaffe coverage, or horse race coverage in general, generates a lot of readership. If someone on your side commits a gaffe you can fret about how to overcome such a major mistake, and if someone on the other side does it, well that just proves how terrible they were all along, right? Either way there is a built in market for these sorts of stories.
Which means that gaffe coverage isn’t going to end, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that important either.
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