It’s time for the news media to add more horses to the political horse race.
It comes down to this question, asked by my twelve-year-old daughter as we watched some very unpleasant political personalities on CNN: “Are there only two candidates?”
Well, no, I told her. “Then how come they don’t talk about them?” she asked.
Good question. Perhaps the editorial teams at CNN and Fox and MSNBC, etc. would like to answer that question.
We have two of the most unpopular presidential candidates in American history and the news organizations are practically ignoring a third party candidate who has reached double digits in some recent polls. The Pew Research Center shows Libertarian Gary Johnson at 11 percent, and a CNN/ORC survey put him at 13%. And the strength of Johnson can’t be tied to his charismatic personality – he doesn’t have one – but a reflection of voters looking for an alternative to the two highly vulnerable and imperfect candidates that the Republicans and Democrats have put forward.
Considering the networks figured out a way to cover 17 Republican candidates at one point, I assume they could cover three viable presidential candidates. But that assumes they want to cover someone else. There may be an inherent bias against a Libertarian candidate as not credible enough to throw into the campaigning mix.
But wait a minute. This isn’t your usual “Get off my lawn!” Libertarian. Gary Johnson used to be a Republican ― and a governor no less (of New Mexico). And his running mate, William Weld, was also a Republican governor, of Massachusetts, where a Republican better know how to get along with Democrats if he wants to survive. (Imagine that, Republicans talking with Democrats and vice versa.)
This is the point at which news divisions must use some intelligence to start covering a legitimate presidential ticket. It’s not enough for them to say, “Well, Johnson still is under the 15% threshold to be included in the upcoming presidential debates, so he’s irrelevant.” It’s a Catch-22. If you don’t cover him, he may not get there.
And don’t expect the two major parties to encourage coverage of Johnson. Neither camp is exactly sure what the effect would be of a third party candidate, so they’re not going to encourage the light-chasing cats known as political reporters to shift their attention to Johnson.
There’s another reason that the news organization should cover a third party candidate. If the recent primary season proved anything, it was that a large number of Americans feel left out of the political process. Donald Trump has succeeded in bucking the Republican establishment, which has ripped the party apart and subjected it to criticism that it doesn’t represent Republican voters. And with Bernie Sanders’ success with young voters, one could argue that Hillary Clinton could only have achieved her presumed nomination because the Democratic establishment decided last year that she would be the winner (i.e., almost all of the Superdelegates, 15% of the total delegate vote, committed to Hillary through the primary process).
If the news networks don’t start looking around at some other candidates, like Johnson, they will once again be part of the establishment that missed one development after another during the primary season. To wit: Trump won’t last long. Wrong. Jeb Bush will be a better candidate than his brother. Wrong. Bernie Sanders isn’t a serious candidate. Wrong. Hillary is a shoe in. Wrong. American voters won’t vote for a third party candidate. Wrong.
It’s time for the news media to start thinking outside the box. I mean, outside the Beltway.