Professor Steve Ponder talks with alumni at a reception at the home of Marcia and Ken Aaron. (photo by Ken Aaron)

Pre-primary selection of major party candidates has become the rule in recent presidential elections, according to a study published in the December 2000 issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly. The author, DePaul University political scientist Wayne P. Steger, notes that all major party nominations since 1980 have gone to the candidates who had the most resources before the primary elections actually began.

To win the 2000 pre-primary campaign, Bush and Gore dominated the news and raised the most money to buy political advertising. This media exposure contributed to their superiority in popular opinion polls, which in turn resulted in additional news stories. Challengers in both major parties, notably John McCain and Bill Bradley, lacked the time, money and media exposure to catch up. McCain and Bradley withdrew after “Super Tuesday,” the March 7 primary elections. The national political conventions, held five months later, served primarily as media stages for acceptance speeches by Bush and Gore.

"Acknowledging the extent to which the media have come to dominate the selection process is a challenge to journalists, who prefer to think of themselves as detached observers."

Since Roosevelt’s Progressive era, the influence of party leaders over nominations has declined, while the influence of the mass media has grown. Over the past 50 years, the emergence of new communications technologies, especially television, and changes in party rules have worked to enhance the media’s presence in the selection of presidential candidates.

Since the first televising of a primary election, New Hampshire in 1952, network coverage has become increasingly important in the scheduling of primaries and party caucuses. Other states now compete with New Hampshire to be “first,” and to draw the most media attention.

In New Hampshire, the quad-rennial return of campaigns and correspondents contributes a significant financial boost to the state’s economy. Iowans also have discovered the political and promotional advantages of attracting network news coverage to once-obscure early caucuses.

Legislatures in other states, including Oregon, have moved the dates of their presidential primaries back and forth on the calendar to try to gain influence, or at least publicity.

The cumulative effect of this calendar-shifting has been to front-load the nominations process. As primaries and caucuses are scheduled earlier and earlier in the year, they become more distant from the national conventions and the general election. Citizen participation is low, which tends to concentrate media attention on small groups of voters who are less likely to be representative of the nation as a whole.

Compounding media influence on the selection of candidates have been party reforms, enacted in the 1970s, which were intended to allow increased participation in the nominating process by independent cadidates and citizens.

But candidates quickly discovered that raising money to campaign through the media, paid or unpaid, is easier than trying to organize party workers at local, state, and national levels.

The overall impact of these changes has been to disorganize, and, to some extent, to deconstruct, the process by which major political parties nominate presidential candidates. In a partial vacuum of independently financed candidates, weakened party organizations, and randomly scheduled primaries and caucuses, the mass media have become dominant.

Media exposure of one sort or another determines which candidates will be able to reach the most potential voters, which will be selected by the major political parties, and, to a significant extent, which will be elected President of the United States.

This is not a role that the media have sought, nor it is one they are equipped to perform, constitutionally or in any organized fashion.

Political consultants often distinguish between “free” (news) and “paid” (advertising) media, but this dichotomy fails to describe the continuing proliferation of media forms and formats. In the twenty-first century, there is no longer one “press.” The media are plural, grammatically and institutionally.

It is asking too much to expect media organizations to repair the long-term problems with presidential elections dramatized during the 2000 campaign. Acknowledging the extent to which the media have come to dominate the selection process is a challenge to journalists, who prefer to think of themselves as detached observers.

Some media companies have come to rely on the revenues from political advertising, and see no need for change. But because media organizations have become so prominent in the selection process, however inadvertently, no solution to the problems of presidential elections is likely to be achieved without their participation in any discussion of reform.

UO Foundation Trustee Marcia Aaron ’86, and her husband Ken hosted an evening reception at their Belmont, California home on January 31. The reception, attended by about 30 alumni and friends, included presentations by Dean Tim Gleason and Professor Steve Ponder on the theme “The Press, the Presidency and Election 2000.” The preceding piece by Steve Ponder was inspired by his comments that evening.