Enough With the Stupid Horse Race Framing of the 2024 Presidential Election Already
The way that concerns over Joe Biden’s debate performance on June 27 have dominated recent MSM coverage of the 2024 election is the latest flare up of stupid this election cycle. That’s not to say that it’s not a legitimate topic to report on (it is), or that there isn’t real concern about his performance and more generally his age and fitness to serve (there is). As so often, it’s a question of how this story is being framed.
Let’s use a striking example of contrasting framing to bring the question into sharp focus. The day after the debate, the editorial board of The New York Times published an opinion piece entitled “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race.” The day after that, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board issued a response to the Times: “To serve his country, Donald Trump should leave the race.” (I’ve reproduced the capitalization of both headlines as they were published.)
The Times piece, as you would expect, has all the trappings of careful, impartial — aka “traditional” — journalism. It begins by acknowledging the threat that Trump and his minions pose to American democracy:
“Donald Trump has proved himself to be a significant jeopardy to [our] democracy — an erratic and self-interested figure unworthy of the public trust. He systematically attempted to undermine the integrity of elections. His supporters have described, publicly, a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats. If he is returned to office, he has vowed to be a different kind of president, unrestrained by the checks on power built into the American political system.”
Then after several paragraphs laying out their argument for why Biden should withdraw, they return briefly to the matter of Trump’s fitness:
“Mr. Trump’s own performance ought to be regarded as disqualifying. He lied brazenly and repeatedly about his own actions, his record as president and his opponent. He described plans that would harm the American economy, undermine civil liberties and fray America’s relationships with other nations. He refused to promise that he would accept defeat, returning instead to the kind of rhetoric that incited the Jan. 6 attack on Congress.”
Considered in isolation, these two paragraphs might reasonably prompt readers to ask the board whether they’re sure they’re targeting the right guy. But of course their purpose in introducing these paragraphs is to emphasize the stakes of this election: because Trump poses such a threat, Biden should give way to someone better qualified to take him on.
There are a couple of not insubstantial problems with the Times’ argument that need to be highlighted, both of which derive in large measure from traditional journalistic practice. One is the both-sidesing that it acquiesces to. The Times piece is certainly right to emphasize the election’s stakes: it’s clear that a large-D Democratic victory in November is necessary for the preservation of the small-d democratic project — the very possibility of continuing to fight for a more perfect union. Where the argument goes awry is in its narrowing of the outcome of the presidential election to the perceived strength and stamina of the two candidates — its casting of the election as, in effect, a horse race. This framing ignores everything that has happened since the last election: the implications of the midterm elections (the red wave that spectacularly wasn’t) and the outcomes of the great majority of the special elections since 2020, which Democratic candidates have dominated; the unabated rage of a majority of voters over the Dobbs decision and all the other nakedly partisan, proto-authoritarian rulings that SCOTUS has been dishing out (most recently on the question of presidential immunity); and the growing awareness of just how fucking batshit Project 2025, the radical right Xian white nationalist fascist playbook that the Times board blithely calls Trump’s “2025 agenda,” really is. (Trump himself is now trying to distance himself from it: even he recognizes how politically toxic it is.) As the latter two underscore, the election of a president is only partially a choice between individuals. It is also, and more importantly, a choice between the agendas, the visions for the country, of the political parties/coalitions the candidates represent. By foregrounding the Biden v. Trump horse race, and briefly summarizing all the stuff the election is actually about as evidence for why the Democratic horse should be scratched, the Times piece adopts a safely “impartial” framing of the election. Nowhere is this both-sidesing more evident in the piece than in this extraordinary statement:
“There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden. It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.” (emphasis added)
The horses in this race that have been “forced” on us both have “deficiencies,” we are told. Mr. Trump’s are patent, legion, dangerous AF, etc. etc. etc. Mr. Biden’s are “age and infirmity.” You do the math.
A second problematic aspect of the Times’ argument has to do with the culpability of the current iteration of the GOP. It has become commonplace to write off Trump’s supporters and enablers in the GOP as hopelessly in thrall to him and/or his vice grip on their voters, and thus to assume, as the Times board puts it, that “the burden rests on the Democratic Party to put the interests of the nation above the ambitions of a single man.” There is plenty of evidence that refusing to toe the party, or rather cult line is not a winning political strategy, at least in the short term, viz. the fates of former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for starters. But limiting the choice facing members of the GOP to one of political expediency, of winning the election at all costs, again reverts to the safe, “impartial” horse-race framing, and in so doing fails to perform one of the core functions of a free press: holding those with power accountable. The great majority of Trump’s supporters and enablers may have cashed in their better angels for the proverbial 30 pieces of silver. However, neither their ongoing cowardice and cynicism nor the fact that unchanging stories don’t make great clickbait absolve media outlets from continuing to call out ersatz public servants for failing to serve the voters who put them in office. The Times board attempts to dress up the GOP’s fecklessness as Greek drama: “It is a tragedy that Republicans themselves are not engaged in deeper soul-searching after Thursday’s debate.” This lets Trump’s sycophants off far too lightly. Tragedies are faits accomplis for which nothing is left but the mourning; but as the careers of former Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger attest, there is life after Trump. And the general election is still four months away.
As its title suggests, the piece by the Inquirer’s board effectively inverts the Times op-ed. It starts by acknowledging that Biden’s performance in the debate was “a disaster,” but then quickly pivots to Trump’s unfitness for the office he’s running for, and declares flatly, “The debate about the debate is misplaced. The only person who should withdraw from the race is Trump.” What follows is a litany of Trump’s malfeasance and incompetence in one punchy short paragraph after another, effectively a bulleted list. The piece returns to Biden at the end, acknowledging that he “must show that he is up to the job,” but also noting in brief that he “has a substantive record of real accomplishments,” “has surrounded himself with experienced people who take public service seriously,” and “has passed major bipartisan legislation despite a dysfunctional Republican House majority.” The prose lacks the polish and patina of gravitas of the Times piece, opting instead to evoke the urgency of the moment, and to emphasize the simplicity of the choice facing voters: “Trump is an unserious carnival barker running for the most serious job in the world…If anything, [he] doesn’t deserve to be on the presidential debate stage. Why even give him a platform?” Why say more? This isn’t fucking rocket science. “There was only one person at the debate who does not deserve to be running for president. The sooner Trump exits the stage, the better off the country will be.”
It might be objected that the Inquirer board underplays the seriousness of the concerns about Biden. I would argue, however, that they quite properly try to refocus voters’ attention where it belongs. The Inquirer piece reframes the debate performance as one data point in a much larger set: one night v. decades of competent to inspired public service on the one hand, and years of execrable policies and decades of execrable behavior on the other. In so doing, it tacitly underscores the inadequacy of the horse race metaphor. A horse race is a short (usually two-plus minute) event with a set start and finish time. The jockeys and other members of the team that have trained the horses are in the frame, but our attention remains fixed on the horses themselves. The thing we focus on when watching the horses, moreover, is their relative physical prowess: their strength, stamina, etc. Judged by those narrow and largely irrelevant standards, Trump “won” the debate in that his voice was louder and more sustained, and his physical presence more forceful. (Andrew Prokop observed of Trump’s performance in an article for Vox that while “he said absurd and untrue things, rambled and lost coherence[,]…he did it more energetically.”)
This appearance of strength along with his PR instincts and the fanatical devotion of his base are the only things Trump has going for him as a candidate. And it’s a credit to those instincts, I suppose, that his incessant bellyaching about fairness c/w MAGA’s emphasis on a mostly performative iteration of “strength” — e.g., the recent, thinly veiled threat of a bloody revolution by the dweebish prez of the Heritage Foundation— dovetail so well with trad journalism’s desire to appear “impartial.” By incessantly working the MSM refs re: their supposed bias, in other words, and pounding the drum about Biden’s supposed weakness and their own dubious virility, Trump and his MAGA minions have largely succeeded in diverting attention away from substantive issues about policy towards the spectacle of the “race.” Assessing policy runs the risk of *gasp* appearing partisan. Reciting and analyzing poll numbers, by contrast, seems safely “fair”: Around the second turn, it’s Mr. Trump by two lengths.
At least as long as Trump is shown to be winning.
The Inquirer piece reminds voters that presidenting isn’t mere performance: competence, temperament — fitness for office — matter far more. So too, as I noted above, do agendas and visions for the country, a point that the Inquirer piece presses, if largely by implication. While focusing on Trump himself in the main, the piece does cite several of his policies that, they assert, “did plenty of damage”: his “giant tax cuts,” his favoring of the oil and coal industries and decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, his packing of the federal judiciary with “extreme judges consisting mainly of white males, including a number who the American Bar Association rated as not qualified,” etc. Biden, by contrast, “has surrounded himself with experienced people who take public service seriously.” The Inquirer board also, if again implicitly, does something the Times board declines to do: it calls out the GOP for continuing to support Trump. “The sooner Trump exits the stage, the better off the country will be.” Surely no one who is following the election expects Trump himself to heed such a call. He is after all running in no small part to stay out of prison (a point the Inquirer piece bluntly notes), and to the extent that he even understands it, he doesn’t give a fuck about the higher calling of the office. It’s up to the party he has hijacked to grow a spine and reject him. And if the odds of that happening seem slim to none at this point, the Inquirer board at least recalls trad journalism’s higher calling to hold the powerful accountable.
Again, all of this is not to say that there’s no validity in raising concerns about Biden’s performance. As Prokop notes,
“Politics should be about more than theater criticism and affect. It’s about important issues that will affect the lives of millions of people. Unfortunately, the question of what a relatively small group of swing voters thinks about Joe Biden’s age may well be what the 2024 election hinges on.”
But it’s also worth considering to what extent that latter concern might be a function of media’s framing of the election rather than voters’ convictions. Eighty million eligible voters didn’t go to the polls in 2020 — about a third of the electorate. Framing the election as a horse race and repeatedly emphasizing how unentertaining the horses are tacitly tells those voters, and voters who did come out in 2020 but are wavering this time, that it’s okay to sit this one out. And any suppression of the vote favors the Trump campaign. It’s additionally true that the alternative being pushed — to switch horses midstream — carries substantial risks, but ultimately this whole line of argument is, as the Inquirer piece asserts, beside the point. Let’s ditch this stupid framing and instead focus voters’ attention where it belongs: on the pretty stellar record of the Biden administration over the last three-plus years, on the competence and character of Biden himself and the other people in his administration, and on the significant, even existential threat that four more years of Trump and his minions poses.
