Near the end of my career in daily print journalism, I began to question the value of newspaper “endorsements.”
We didn’t really even like to refer to them out loud as endorsements. We preferred the term “recommendations.” We’d recommend a candidate of our choice while understanding that voters are independent thinkers — or so they say — and wouldn’t take whatever the newspaper said as gospel.
These days I’m beginning to wonder about voters’ independence. The plethora of social media and big-money advertising are having the kind of influence on voters’ thought process that, well, newspaper endorsements might have had a half-century or longer ago.
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry perhaps demonstrated better than anyone in recent times how newspaper editorial endorsements’ value has diminished.
When he ran for re-election in 2010, Perry announced he wouldn’t even talk to newspaper editorial boards. He’d go straight to the voters. He didn’t need no stinkin’ newspaper editors’ approval.
How didĀ Gov. Perry do at the ballot box that year? He thumped Republican primary opponent Kay Bailey Hutchison — no slouch as a Texas politician herself — and then clobbered Democratic nominee Bill White that fall. White, by the way, garnered virtually every newspaper endorsement there was to get in Texas — including from the Amarillo Globe-News, where I worked as editorial page editor; it did him virtually no good at all.
So now, in this presidential election cycle, newspapers are weighing in. The “influential” Des Moines Register endorsed Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Hillary Clinton in advance of the Iowa caucuses. Over the weekend, the Boston Globe endorsed Clinton as the neighboring New Hampshire primary approaches.
There will be others coming along as the campaigns proceed along the long and winding road toward the parties’ conventions. Newspaper editors and publishers will extend the invitation for the candidates to make their cases. Some of them will accept; others will follow the Perry model.
In the end, however, none of these endorsements — or recommendations — likely will be decisive.
Voters are getting their heads filled by ideologues on both sides of the divide. Their minds are made up.
What’s more, during the more than three decades I practiced my craft in daily journalism, I never heard first-hand any voter say they changed their mind on an election based on a newspaper endorsement.
Maybe they’re out there.
Back to my initial question: Do these endorsements really matter?