Campaign Coverage Guaranteed to Make You Dumber

Whenever you see the word "expectations," click away as fast as you can

Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Iowa caucuses are an abomination, an affront to any reasonable understanding of democracy made only more offensive by Iowans’ insistence that they represent all that is good and right about rule by the people. I’ve ranted about this subject before (see here or here) so I won’t lay out the case to kill the caucuses once and for all. Just one of the many reasons is that turnout in Iowa is incredibly small; the last time both parties held contested caucuses, in 2016, turnout was just 15.7 percent.

But news stories must be written about this ridiculous farce, which is what brings us to how the Iowa caucuses and subsequent primary contests are covered, in particular the endlessly discussed topic of “expectations.”

With the caucuses just days away, we are neck deep in “expectations” coverage, in which reporters who have nearly run out of worthwhile things to say about what has been an unusually uneventful campaign begin trying to convince their audiences that what matters is not so much who wins more votes, but how each candidate’s results compares to a total reporters have decided they are “expected” to receive. To wit:

The way this works is that reporters first come to a collective decision on what they expect a candidate to get, then hold that expectation up as though it represents some kind of truth about the world; over time what was once just some people making guesses about the future begins to take on a kind of heft, the unreal made real.

As the day of the vote approaches, the reporters talk more and more about the expectations they have set, increasing the perception that it’s not just them but everyone — the campaigns, political activists, voters — who are not only in agreement about what the expectations are but deeply invested in whether or not those expectations are met. Then the day finally comes, votes are cast, and those same reporters who invented the expectations say, “Behold! Here is what happened, and how it relates to EXPECTATIONS!”

It’s important to keep in mind when you read this stuff that in truth, expectations are meaningless. All too often campaigns are covered like sporting events, but at least the journalists who cover the latter stop blathering about expectations once the game has taken place and there’s an actual outcome to report. If the Chiefs are favored to win the Super Bowl by 12 points over the Eagles but wind up winning by only 5, the next day’s headlines don’t say “Eagles Exceed Expectations,” they say “Chiefs Win Super Bowl.”

Expect nothing, except that expectations will be expected

That isn’t to say that expectations are completely arbitrary; reporters are guessing what’s going to happen, but they’re trying to make an accurate guess. They have some empirical evidence to go on (i.e. polls) and some vibes-based assessments that they make as they traverse the state. It’s hard for them not to get caught up in the vibes, because they’re human beings and their human interactions end up carrying outsize weight in their minds. If a reporter sees no real movement in polls but talks to two separate voters who say they used to support DeSantis but now they’re going to caucus for Haley, those conversations will inevitably seem meaningful. Unlike poll results, they were real people, with names and personalities and corporeal substance, who were nice enough to take a minute to answer the reporter’s questions. 

But let’s say reporters are getting the impression from their conversations that some significant number of voters are abandoning DeSantis for Haley, and they write stories setting expectations a bit higher for Haley, and then lo and behold DeSantis comes in second while Haley comes in third. Does that mean that DeSantis is actually a fantastically charismatic candidate who is on his way to a remarkable upset? Or that Haley is a terrible campaigner who just doesn’t have what it takes to get to the White House? No. It means the expectations were wrong. Nothing more than that, really.

That’s true whichever way the expectations turn out to be incorrect. If reporters in all their wisdom thought Haley would get 10 percent and she got 15 percent, it wouldn't mean that a wave of Haleymania is sweeping the country. It just means they slightly underestimated her support among Iowa Republicans. If you want to believe that getting 15 percent in the caucuses is a huge deal for a candidate I suppose you can try to make that case, but either 15 percent is a lot, or it isn’t. It ought to have some objective value regardless of whether a bunch of reporters thought the candidate who got 15 percent was going to get 10 or they thought she was going to get 20. 

Here are some expectations for you: Trump will win the caucuses, and Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis will follow, in one order or another. Reporters will make a big deal out of which one of those two is ahead of the other, even if it’s by a tiny margin. But keep asking: Why is this important? If Haley gets 20 percent and DeSantis gets 19 percent, how is that meaningfully different from DeSantis getting 20 and Haley getting 19?

Why do reporters spend so much time on this? The simplest reason is that they need to find something to write about, which is harder than you might think. Campaigns are repetitive exercises in which there is often a lot of activity without much happening that could be honestly characterized as “news.” The candidates are running from place to place giving speeches and shaking hands, but if your job is to write stories about it you can find yourself at a loss for some new angle to present to your audience. Expectations provide that: You can write stories about what today’s expectations are and how they differ from yesterday’s expectations, then you can write about whether expectations were met.

I understand that talking about the absurdity of expectations makes me kind of a party pooper. For those of us who care about it, politics is both important and fun, at least some of the time — it’s got wacky personalities, unexpected plot twists, and the uncertainty of outcome that is the foundation of every sporting event and work of fiction. You come along for the ride because of what happens along the way, not just because you want to know the ending. 

But political coverage could still be interesting even if it was stripped of many of the inane things reporters spend their time worrying about. You can do your part to make a better future by ignoring expectations coverage; who knows, maybe sooner or later they’ll get the hint.