While listening to either the Diane Rehm weekly news roundup or NPR’s “It’s All Politics” the other day, I was struck by the typical focus on the “game” or “horse race” aspect of the presidential election, and politics generally. Political coverage in the United States rarely considers the relative substantive merits of a particular candidate’s or party’s platform; rather, we talk about it from the perspective of political strategy–winning or losing the base, or a particular sub-demographic, or a key state or part of a key state. (The specific comment that set me off on this line of thought had to do with Romney’s likelihood of carrying Pennsylvania; the panelist said that it would be “gravy” and that Romney had several routes to the required number of electoral votes that didn’t include PA.)
I’m not a fan of this style of political reporting, but this isn’t GD and that’s not what I’m here to talk about. What I got curious about was whether this style of political reporting was common in other democracies, or was a consequence of our rather peculiar system. Obviously on the level of specifics, particularly the electoral college, it’s going to be specific to the US, but does the broad style hold in the UK, or France, or Denmark, or Finland, or wherever?
Here in Canada, I would say it’s a mixture - political commentary during the election focuses on how the campaign is going, which party is going to be stronger in a particular province or region, and so on, but also discussion of what the politicians are campaigning on.
The major difference is that your political campaigns are so long - by this time it’s pretty clear where Obama and Romney stand, so there’s not much news value in talking about it. The campaign is what generates news, not their positions.
In a parliamentary system, the campaign is much, much shorter - 6 weeks is about average for Canadian federal elections. The parties tend to make their policy announcements during the campaign, intentionally staggering their announcements to get news coverage throughout the campaign. The news media responds to this by covering new policy announcements as well as the electoral strategy.
Not really in France, but as you said, what you describe is probably a result of the American electoral system. No electoral college, so losing local support isn’t really relevant, no primaries (well…there has been primaries for the socialist candidate last year in France, but it’s the first time it happened in France and I understand the second time in Europe, and it was only one party) so it doesn’t matter who’s supporting potential candidates either and finally no real ethnic vote.
In fact, the closest to what you describe doesn’t exist in the USA : since France has a multi-party system, what matters and is discussed a lot is who will gain the votes of the electors of secondary parties. For the second round of the presidential elections, will the center-right candidate call to vote for the main right-wing candidate that he despises, for the socialist candidate, for neither? Will voters follow his lead? Wil the socialist candidate radicalize his positions due to the unexpected success of the far left candidate? Have promises (participation in a future government) been made and to whom? How will the supporters of the far-right candidate vote (not necessarily for the right, her being mostly a populist candidate), wasn’t the last main candidate’s speech intentded to attract their support? Etc…
And the same kind of issues will be discussed again during the incoming legislative elections.