Boston Globe columnist John Ellis reminds us that for all intents and purposes, the Democratic nominee will be decided by Super Tuesday in March, months before the convention and it's the media, not the voters, who will choose a winner.
Major media coverage of a presidential campaign breaks down into four parts: the preprimary season, the primary season, the summer conventions, and the general election season (including the debates and the expensive election night broadcast).
What happens every four years, without fail, is that major media organizations blow through their preprimary budgets. In the run-up to the Iowa caucuses, they have already begun eating into the budget for primary coverage.
By the time the Iowa caucus results are reported and the campaign caravan decamps to New Hampshire, the CFOs of the various news organizations (and their parent companies) are apoplectic, muttering darkly about “wild overspending.” Word quickly comes down from on high: It has to stop.
And stop it does. After New Hampshire, the coverage of many candidates becomes the coverage of two (maybe three, but probably not). Costs are cut by relying on affiliates and local news outlets to provide video and text from “the campaign trail,” which is then stitched together by producers and editors in New York.
The real campaign plays out in Manhattan and Washington television studios. Cable news outlets (especially) make every effort to push the “campaign” into television studios and away from “the campaign trail.”
Because of budget concerns, the pressure to anoint a winner increases as the early March Super Tuesday primaries near. We saw this in 2016. Hillary Clinton was declared the winner long before she actually won the nomination. This time, California will be deemed decisive. Whoever wins there, it will be said, wins the nomination.
The rationale for this projection will be financial fact: Every losing candidate will have spent his or her last dollars on advertising in frightfully expensive Super Tuesday media markets. Reality will say they cannot carry on (without money). Reports of the winner’s post-Super Tuesday fund-raising windfall will reinforce this analysis.
In the meantime, coverage of the Democratic presidential nomination campaign will be framed by a “brackets” narrative. The semi-finals bracket narrative has already commenced.
Joe Biden, for the moment, leads in the “most-likely-to beat-Trump bracket.” (Pete Buttigieg is moving up.) Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are running neck and neck in the “street fight” bracket, although it appears that Warren has gained the upper hand.
The finalists will be chosen by Iowa and New Hampshire. The finals will play out against the backdrop of electability. If surveys show that Warren is just as likely to beat Trump as, say, Biden, she’ll win Super Tuesday and, in all likelihood, be the nominee.
Which brings us to one last point about the Democratic primary and caucus electorate. They want the nomination process over quickly. Preferably, they’d like a nominee by mid-March. Whether it’s Biden or Warren or Buttigieg or Sanders, at some level, doesn’t matter. They just want to drop the gloves and start the brawl, with or without an agenda.
I think Buttigieg is going to crash, possibly replaced by Harris. But we're already effectively down to five while for some insane reason more Democrats are entering the field.
I am going to be very glad when primary season ends. We need a candidate and to solidify behind them and go take Trump and the GOP down ASAP.
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