Last Updated: February 03, 2000
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The 2000 campaign
With the race crammed into just three months, fund
raising and voter unawareness become much more important to tackle quickly
To David Yepsen, political editor of the Des Moines Register, "it feels
like fall." Fall of 2000, that is.
A year before the presidential election, Yepsen and other journalists
who cover politics are scrambling to stay on top of fast-moving developments
in the race for the White House.
An old adage is that voters don't focus on the presidential race until
after the World Series. Well, even before the 1999 World Series, there
were these headlines: GOP front-runner George W. Bush collected a record
$56 million, and four Republican candidates - Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle,
Lamar Alexander and John Kasich - dropped out. On the Democratic side,
Bill Bradley's surprisingly strong challenge prompted Al Gore to shake
up his campaign, Gore captured an early endorsement from the AFL-CIO, and
Warren Beatty mulled a long-shot bid from the Left Coast. Meanwhile, a
possible fight for the Reform Party nomination was shaping up between Pat
Buchanan, backed by Lenora Fulani, and Donald Trump, backed by Jesse Ventura.
The flurry of developments was "enough to exhaust even the hardiest
of political junkies," Dan Balz wrote in The Washington Post.
Early starts to the presidential campaign are nothing new, of course.
But the pace of the 2000 race has been accelerated by the bunching of next
year's key caucuses and primaries into a seven-week period between late
January and mid-March. In political parlance, it's called "front-loading."
The compressed schedule, still somewhat in flux, is expected to start
with the Louisiana Republican caucuses on Jan. 15. By the ides of March,
about 70 percent of the pledged convention delegates will have been chosen.
"Just as the calendar gets front-loaded, our coverage has to get front-loaded,
too," Yepsen says.
The numbers bear that out. Four national newspapers - the Los Angeles
Times, The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post - ran 687
stories about the presidential campaign between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31 of this
year, according to a study by Princeton Survey Research Associates for
the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. That was up from 575
stories during the comparable period in 1995 and 392 stories in 1991.
Although coverage is up this year, public interest isn't keeping pace.
The Pew Center survey showed that only 15 percent of those questioned in
September said they were "very closely" following news about candidates
for the 2000 presidential election. That trailed the tax-cut debate in
Washington (18 percent), new charges about the FBI's actions at the Branch
Davidian compound in Waco (22 percent), the situation in Kosovo (26 percent),
the first earthquake in Turkey (27 percent) and the Jewish Community Center
shootings in Los Angeles (29 percent).
Moreover, 28 percent of those surveyed by Pew said there's too much
coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign, compared to 18 percent who
thought so in October 1995 and 12 percent in October 1991. Despite the
front-loaded primaries, "it could be that voters are still on the same
schedule as they used to be," says Andrew Kohut, Pew Center director.
That raises the unsettling prospect that the party nominations could
be decided before many voters have even tuned in to the races.
Political reporters and editors say they've been doing their best to
convey a sense of urgency in their coverage and introduce the public to
the candidates. The Washington Post has run lengthy, multiday profiles
of the major-party front-runners, Bush and Gore. The Dallas Morning News
has pegged shorter profiles and enterprise pieces to the candidates' formal
announcements of entry into the race.
Because such announcements trigger a flurry of publicity, "the candidates
have figured out that if they announce three or four times, people will
cover it three or four times," says Carl Leubsdorf, Washington bureau chief
for the Morning News.
His newspaper has reporters traveling full-time with Bush, Leubsdorf
says, and has done stories about its home-state governor's draft record,
the role of religion in his life and the allegations of past drug use.
Is all this pre-election year coverage too much, too soon?
Carl Sessions Stepp, who teaches journalism at the University of Maryland,
doesn't think so. He says profiles such as those done by the Washington
Post are a public service that give voters important information about
the candidates.
Stepp, a senior editor at American Journalism Review, says papers that
do profiles now shouldn't hesitate to run them again, even in substantially
similar form, during the election year, when voter interest is higher.
Aside from profiles and polls, much of the early coverage has focused on
campaign fund-raising. For one thing, it's a quantifiable measure of support
for the candidates. In 2000, the electorate votes. This year, the money
votes.
The front-loaded primary schedule makes early fund raising more important
than ever. In the past, candidates could use early boosts in Iowa or New
Hampshire to raise money for the primaries later in the winter and the
spring. In 2000, it's unlikely that candidates will have enough time to
raise cash after Louisiana, Iowa and New Hampshire to be competitive in
the March 7 and March 14 primaries.
Money "is almost the whole ballgame," Yepsen says. "George W. Bush has
won the 'money primary' big."
The compressed schedule of primaries has its origins in the reforms
of the 1960s, when the political parties and many states tried to minimize
the influence of political bosses and make the presidential selection process
more democratic. The caucuses and primaries leading up to the nominating
conventions were staggered so voters could evaluate the candidates over
several months.
"During the 1990s, however, a headlong rush to be early in the electoral
cycle produced an every-state-for-itself obsession, obliterating the objectives
sought by the initial reforms," Robert Schmuhl, chairman of the American
Studies department at the University of Notre Dame, has written. "What
was intended to be a nominating marathon that tested a potential president's
endurance, talent for handling pressure, and ability to work with and appeal
to large numbers of people over time is now an inane (if not insane) dash
that puts a premium on how much money a candidate can raise to advertise
in the early states' media markets."
Few academics - and journalists, for that matter - think the front-loaded
primaries are a positive development. "The nomination fight will be over
before a lot of voters have a change to pay attention," Yepsen says. "As
a reporter, I'm not supposed to care. As a citizen, I think Americans are
being shortchanged."
Various proposals are being floated to create a more orderly, stretched-out
primary schedule in time for the 2004 presidential race. But despite widespread
dissatisfaction with the nominating process, sweeping changes appear unlikely.
"The day after the (2000) election," Yepsen says, "the winning party will
have a guy in the White House who likes this system just the way it is."
Sternberg is Washington editor of USA Today.
