Tomorrow brings the first significant televised debate among 2023 Louisiana gubernatorial candidates, yet the most significant candidate by the polls won’t be there. That reflects an escalating trend towards ushering this kind of campaign event into irrelevancy, because candidates increasingly control the presentation of campaign information.
Front runner Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry won’t attend this put on by a consortium of television stations, the Baton Rouge Advocate, and the Urban League. He said he would take a pass because of the Urban League’s presence, which holds itself out as nonpartisan but has a history of fronting left-wing causes. For example, Landry has been critical of overbroad assertions of affirmative action, most recently filing suit to prevent the federal government from applying outcome-oriented usage of it for environmental regulation without regard for intent, while the Urban League has given full-throated support of expansive use of the concept.
Landry also may have had queasiness about the Advocate, which has a thinly-disguised antipathy towards him that shapes its coverage of the campaign. When it’s not publicizing molehills in an attempt to make mountains out of Landry oversights, it reprints pieces from the far-left Louisiana Illuminator website that makes no bones about its disdain for Landry, and its subsidiary shopper Gambit’s leftist editor unleashes editorial broadsides against him.
No matter. Landry can sit out widely-televised debates – although he has pledged to participate in one next week by another consortium of television stations – without any harm to his chances of winning because of how technology has revolutionized how politicians can communicate with candidates.
He’s not the first gubernatorial candidate to pass on widely-broadcast deabtes. Republican former Gov. Bobby Jindal didn’t bother at all in 2011, while in 2015 Republican former Sen. David Vitter skipped some. These past choices reveal, and amplify, why Landry’s choice not only won’t hurt his campaign but also avoids potential harm to it.
To start, front runners derive the least benefit from a candidate forum. The last thing they want to do is to appear to grant equal stature to those trying to catch him from well behind by sharing a stage with them. Additionally, the least controllable environment for a candidate is these kinds of events, where they are at most risk to commit gaffes, and by definition front runners have the most to lose when they make such errors.
But the thing is, for this to work you have to be a genuine front runner. It worked for Jindal because he faced nonentities as opponents. It didn’t work for Vitter because although he figured himself as having support akin to what Landry has today, at least a third of the intended electorate, in reality what little polling had occurred up to that point pointed to a trend that came through on election day: Vitter only marginally outpaced other GOP big names in the field, with their infighting allowing Democrat then-state Rep. John Bel Edwards to slip away.
Landry has that advantage and, better for him, increased technological benefits compared to a dozen years ago. Then, social media still was gaining traction and smart phones weren’t widely in use. Now, social media occupies an important informational tool for many, particularly among those without a lot of interest in politics to receive information about politics, while smart phones are nearing ubiquity.
Every day that passes gives politicians more enhanced ability to communicate directly with voters and capacity to bypass intermediaries such as the media. And when you have $8 million in the bank like Landry, that magnifies this.
The goal of candidates is to place in front of a voter information they want him to have. Decades ago, that was difficult. Direct mail or phone contact was intermittent and expensive, and other contact such as media ads over airwaves and on eye-level signage were inefficient and hit and miss. Often, they needed unreliable intermediaries such as media coverage by way of news or news events like debates to supplement their efforts to have any serious chance of winning.
That’s all changed. Through social media, e-mail, texting, and web advertisements candidates now have a far greater ability to establish direct contact in much more targeted ways more likely for the casual observer of politics to consume, rather than hope the occasional view of a flier or billboard or seeing/hearing a media ad dropped in a predictable time slot subsumed by other programming gets the job done. Or, to put in context of the debate, why make the effort to tune in and give up an hour of your time when the information will come before you organically in your social media feed, the websites you visit, e-mail notes you receive, and text messages (all of which you’re free to ignore if you like)? Or why take the effort to look up what the chattering classes have to say about a contest when candidate information, as well as information from others but likely curated according to your partisan and issue preferences, comes right at you?
Little has changed about the small subset of the population interested in politics and how they become persuaded. And the two-step flow of information, where the casual voter who wants to think minimally about a vote decision may rely upon a transmitter, like another politician, media, or a person they consider informed, for an opinion on how to vote still applies. But relying upon the informed has decreased in importance because the information now is so readily available, because the costs for candidates communicating that has dropped so dramatically.
Perhaps no institution has seen such a steep decline in its influence over elections as the legacy media, as new media and candidates muscle them out of the way. Legacy media and a special interest are precisely the entities conducting this forum. The small numbers that consumed these events even two decades ago have fallen dramatically, and the much larger portion representing the generally-inattentive population who used to depend upon them to transmit information crucial to their vote choices likewise has plunged in size. Candidates with sufficient resources to conduct one-on-one communications with voters don’t need this tool to succeed, and given how participation can degrade a campaign depending upon circumstances, the rational choice for such blessed candidates is to minimize participation in these.
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