Patricia Nell Warren has a great post up over at bilerico on the subject of the media and election perceptions. The major media’s efforts to stuff an event into a particular sort of narrative becomes evident when the event is a little ambiguous. It’s sort of the election equivalent of the legal maxim that “hard cases make bad law.” In both cases, it’s just tough to stuff the thing in the box you had all set up for the occasion.
Nevada is a good example. Every election night, the major news outfits want desperately to declare a “winner.” But, the problem is, things are a little fuzzy out there. In Nevada, they have caucuses that nominate delegates that go up to the state level and eventually 25 state delegates are chose to go to the National Democratic Convention. Getting delegates at the district level who are committed to you is the point of the caucus process, but it guarantees nothing. The delegates aren’t obligated to vote for a particular candidate, though it would seem like the honorable thing to do. Despite losing in the popular vote, Obama is either tied with or ahead of Clinton in terms of probable delegates. Clinton received more votes by a fair margin. Obama is claiming a victory because he got more delegates (according to some counts). Clinton is saying, “you haven’t won anything because those delegates could change allegiance.” Unreliable as the delegate count might be, it was the only thing legally at stake in the Nevada primary. As little as Obama actually “won,” Clinton “won” even less.
Now, what’s really at stake is the media narrative. Clinton wants the national news outlets to declare her a “winner” so that more people will want to jump on her bandwagon further down the line. Events like Nevada make us look at our election process a little closer, and, when we do, it all looks a little ridiculous. Are these primaries really nothing more than a pretext for creating an artificial media narrative? Insane. If that’s not the reason for these elections, and the primaries are about winning delegates, then Obama won Iowa; Obama won New Hampshire – because he got more delegates, even though he lost the popular vote to Clinton; and Obama won or tied Nevada for the same reason. And, for what it’s worth, Clinton isn’t really in a position to make a lot of noise about the virtues of pure democracy in the primary process. Even though that would help her in terms of claiming victory in New Hampshire and Nevada, she has to be mindful of the fact that her real advantage in the primary process at the moment is her lead in the quest for “superdelegates” — those delegates to the Democratic nomination that aren’t directly elected through the primary process, but who are part of the Democratic Party establishment. As I recall, they make up something like 1/3 of the delegates.
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