Tethered Swimming

Many conclusions will be drawn from Hillary Clinton’s surprise victory in New Hampshire yesterday.  The one I’m choosing to draw is that there is no point in following US election coverage.  I’ve long said that you can ignore political campaign coverage that happens months before any actual voting takes place.  Yesterday I learned that you can, in fact, ignore political campaign coverage that happens mere days before actual voting takes place.

My longstanding point about ignoring primary debates, media kerfuffles and polling numbers was based on the idea that anything that happens more than a couple of weeks in advance will have little to no meaning once voting actually starts.  Then we had the four days between Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa and Clinton’s victory in New Hampshire.  The general level of foolishness built on itself over the weekend to a crescendo on Monday and Tuesday where Obama had an insurmountable lead and there was rampant speculation that Clinton’s campaign would undergo a severe shakeup.  Then Clinton won and now the cycle is going to begin anew.

Now, it is certainly possible that factors unique to this race or to New Hampshire, a state that famously considers itself independent, caused the polls and the pundits to get this one so spectacularly wrong.  That it all happens in a very concentrated media environment when everyone has had too much coffee and too little sleep doesn’t help.  But the simple fact remains that every single poll I saw the last couple of days had Obama with a significant lead, every single story I read yesterday all but assumed that Clinton was going to lose, and every single one of them was wrong.

The only conclusion to be drawn is that pre election coverage is a complete and total waste of time.  The tools at the disposal of modern political coverage, from vaguely scientific polling to first hand accounts of stump speeches and crowd reactions, clearly don’t get the job done and if you don’t have the right tools it’s usually impossible to get any job done.  Obviously we cannot expect perfection, and predictions and prognostications are notoriously wrong, but the last four days are a very stark example of how election coverage can get carried away with itself.

Did the “Hillary is Doomed!” story cause more Clinton supporters to go to the polls?  Did she just have a remarkably effective campaign the last couple of days?  Did Edwards or Obama drop the ball and nobody noticed?  We’ll never know and we probably can’t know.  We have a tool for actually measuring what people think, they’re called ballots and everything else is just speculative masturbation.

Going forward that’s a good lesson to remember.  Whatever the storylines that dominate the coming days and weeks, whatever the poll numbers indicate, the only thing you can be certain of is that they are wrong.  So sit back, pour yourself a drink and make some popcorn.  Grab your remote and flip on CNN or turn on your computer and open up your favorite political website, because just like the psychic hotline, they’re for entertainment purposes only.