How Slow Boring plans to cover the 2024 election

The stakes matter more than the narrative

The 2024 presidential election feels in some ways like it’s been happening since January 6, 2021.

But on another level, I feel like only now is the reality is finally settling on a restive public that the two nominees really are going to be Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And while of course Slow Boring has published articles about the campaign, it feels like a good time to try to clearly articulate how we are thinking about covering it — in part to let you know and in part as an exercise to clarify our thinking.

I was on a panel at SUNY Stony Brook a couple of weeks ago about The Media and The 2024 Campaign, and one thing that everyone could agree on is that “the media” is far too diffuse a target to generalize about these days. But looking back on the 2016 election, I am continually struck by the thought that outlets I personally read, outlets I personally wrote for, and articles that I personally wrote did not convey the stakes of the race clearly or correctly. Which is something that I say not in the spirit of “press coverage was too mean to Hillary Clinton” or “press coverage focused too much on her emails” (though I do think both of those things are true), but that the critical scrutiny of Donald Trump was a bit oddly uninformative. A lot of Trump coverage — including coverage that is very harsh and negative — treats him as a kind of metaphor rather than as a person.

You could have read a lot of Trump coverage and still not known that one consequence of Trump winning would be a relaxation of post-crisis bank safety regulations. A lot of actual working bankers probably knew that, though, and many of them probably voted for Trump in part for that reason, even while disapproving of some of the stuff he said or even while their spouses went the other way. This particular policy change was, I think, a really bad idea.

Conversely, another fairly predictable consequence of Trump winning was that Obama-era water efficiency rules for dishwashers got revised in a more business-friendly direction. On this one, I think Trump is probably closer to the mark than Obama or Biden. And I note with interest that nobody I know personally who works in Democratic Party politics is particularly excited about the Democratic appliance regulation agenda. Yet it occurs whether or not anyone particularly wants it to.

On an issue where the stakes are higher, “the border” has loomed large as a Biden-era talking point, much as we discussed “the wall” in 2016 and “the caravan” in the 2018 cycle. What has never attracted as much attention is the fact that Trump, during his four years in office, did much more to reduce legal immigration than illegal immigration. Biden, by contrast, has re-increased legal immigration. And if Trump wins again, he will again try to bring it back down. This dispute over legal immigration is less demagogic and has more to do with fairly arcane regulatory matters. But the big structural reason that legal immigration changes more than illegal immigration is precisely that it’s legal. The president can influence illicit border-crossing, but the whole point is that it’s illicit. People sell cocaine even though it’s illegal, and nobody knows how to reduce the amount of cocaine-selling to zero. But there are fairly straightforward ways to influence legal immigration.

So this is what I hope, most of all, to be able to say that I achieved in my coverage of the 2024 campaign: I want people to understand what the election is “about” not in a narrative or thematic sense, but what concretely is happening.

The horse race matters

Something that I think you’re supposed to say on high-minded panels about election coverage is that too much attention is paid to the horse race.

And I do think poll-gazing and demographic speculation should be secondary to informing people about the options and covering actual news events. Part of the idea of democracy is that the people should, on some level, get what they want. If we’re all making a huge mistake about public opinion and actually voters love the idea of raising the retirement age to 70, then it would be a huge substantive mistake to not deliver that for them. Now, I don’t think there is any reason to believe we’re making a mistake about that. But the fact that liberal cosmopolitan values aren’t held by most voters is important not just for election forecasting, but for understanding why many of Trump’s fans view him as a true force for democracy, even while others (more accurately) view him as a threat to it.

Covering the horse race in real time also matters because while the media can’t determine how people vote, we really can determine how elite political actors respond to the outcome.

Last week, I wrote about how I think Democrats came to misinterpret the outcome of the 2016 election as revealing some kind of profound failure of the American economic model. Some of that misinterpretation was wishful thinking, motivated reasoning, or opportunism on the part of leftists. But some of that misinterpretation derived directly from the carnival-like nature of the 2016 horse race coverage. Trump is an outlandish person and was a tabloid fixture long before he was a politician. It was kind of natural under the circumstances to emphasize the outlandish and tabloid nature of Trump as a political phenomenon, rather than to talk in bloodless terms about culturally conservative economic moderate swing voters flipping from Obama to Trump because Trump seemed more economically moderate than Romney.

Right now, we’re seeing a media obsession with the notion that young people — often young people of color — disagreeing with Joe Biden about Israel/Gaza is a big political problem for Biden. As with most misleading horse race narratives, this one is grounded in some genuine facts. Biden’s biggest losses relative to 2020 are, in fact, with younger working class people of color. This is also a demographic group that is relatively skeptical of Israel. What they tend not to tell you is that on the whole, the defectors we are talking about are not highly engaged Palestinian activists — they are disengaged moderates. My sources tell me that age and level of political engagement are the biggest predictors of whether a 2020 Biden voter has defected, but that in terms of issues, the big difference is that defectors care more about inflation and the budget deficit and less about climate change and democracy.

I want to keep covering these horse race questions in the most rigorous way possible, because in the event that Biden loses, I don’t want the interpretation to be that he was just too old or too pro-Israel when I think the real story is that elevating climate to the center of the agenda had some real political downsides and a lot of people just more or less agree with Trump about immigration.

Democracy in the balance

In terms of stakes, I feel a little conflicted about the widespread sentiment among liberals that democracy in some sense hangs in the balance in this race.

On big problem here is that we as human beings struggle to communicate about differential probabilities of unlikely events occurring. Imagine that a Nikki Haley presidency poses a one percent chance of American democracy collapsing, while a Donald Trump presidency poses a five percent chance. That’s a big difference! At the same time, even with Trump, it means there’s a 95 percent chance of democracy continuing. I think that if those are the odds, it makes perfect sense to spend a fair amount of time warning about the risks of Trump-induced democratic collapse. At the same time, it’s still true that if you fire the warning signals, you will likely end up being proven wrong.

We really saw this in an acute way after the events of January 6.

Was it a vindication of the people who’d spent weeks (if not months or years) warning of a Trump coup? Or was it vindication of complacency, since at the end of the day, we had a successful transfer of power? I think the people offering the complacent interpretation of 1/6 are making a serious error. Trump was playing with matches in a room full of sawdust, even if he didn’t have a particularly well-planned scheme to seize power or use lethal force. And he hasn’t apologized, backtracked, or acted chastened in any way. On the contrary, people who backed him have gained status inside the GOP, and his lies about the election served their central purpose of short-circuiting any conservative movement introspection about Trump personally or Trump-era governance.

Under the circumstances, I think his return to power is genuinely dangerous.

That said, I don’t think the future of democracy will be a major theme in our 2024 coverage. For starters, I don’t think there’s that much that’s journalistically interesting to say about it. He lost a fair election, pretends that didn’t happen, and tried to get the results illegally tossed out. What more can I say? And beyond that, I worry about demoralization if Trump wins. I don’t want to tell people that a Trump victory is lights out for democracy. It’s only lights out if people give up! I think that anti-Trump forces have made some discrete, fixable mistakes over the years, not that if he wins we’re vanquished forever. What we’re talking about here is an unacceptably elevated risk, not a certainty.

The normal stuff matters

We will probably never again in my lifetime see a presidential election campaign as perfectly suited to my personal interests as the 2012 Obama-Romney matchup. That election featured dueling white papers, a lot of articles about Tax Policy Center analyses, and YouTube videos of James Kvaal talking about pie charts.

Trump-era politics is not “about” boring public policy issues and budget math in the way Obama vs Romney was. And I fully concede that. But I don’t like or accept that brand of narrativization of politics. Donald Trump was not “about” prudish Christian attitudes toward sexuality, but his election in 2016 led directly to the end of Roe v Wade and the end of abortion rights in a number of states. The economic policies he pursued during his prior term worked out okay largely because John McCain stopped him from tossing millions of people off their health insurance. But had that cookie crumbled slightly differently, the consequences could have been dire.

A lot of people are upset right now at how much the price of food has increased over the past few years, and that’s certainly their right.

The price of groceries is maybe not as important an issue as The Future of Democracy, but I actually do think it’s one where the current journalism market is underserving the public. We all understand that “complaining about grocery prices” is, given the current state of the discourse, an anti-Biden gesture. But what is Trump going to do about it? He’s going to impose a 10 percent tax on imported food, imported fertilizer, and imported farm equipment. And then he’s going to try to deport a huge share of the agricultural workforce. The price of food is going to go up! Or if it doesn’t go up, it will be because he launched trade wars that crush American farmers’ ability to export food.

Either way, he’s going to hammer American productivity. And then he’s going to take a full employment economy and raise interest rates by exploding the budget deficit with regressive tax cuts.

He could mitigate that with spending cuts, but having promised not to touch Social Security, Medicare, or the military, and having committed himself to very expensive new immigration undertakings, that would have to mean a savage war against poor people’s access to medical care and nutrition.

Trump will also roll back all of Biden’s efforts to reduce prescription drug prices.

To me, this is all really bad. And the tendency to ignore or downplay it on the theory that it’s not what the election is “about” in a narrative sense is a means through which even media outlets that are overtly hostile to Trump are, in practice, falling for his propaganda.

Because fundamentally, politics is about power and its use. And what I want to do is try to explain to people what the candidates are proposing to do and what we know about the likely impacts of those efforts. I think the tail risks involved with Trump are real and serious, and the Trump phenomenon is genuinely fascinating in a morbid sort of way, but the banal, concrete impacts of Trump’s policy ideas are the most perennially under-covered story in American politics. And what I want to do this year, to the best of my ability, is contribute to counteracting that under-coverage.