Originally published at: Tom the Dancing Bug - Chagrin Falls: "Diner Journalism" - Boing Boing
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As I’ve said before, I always found it to be fitting punishment for inside-baseball Beltway journalists to be consigned to this frigid corn country hell every four years, doomed to interview ignorant white idiots. Unfortunately, per your accurate cartoon, they take a masochistic pleasure in it.
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Please explain the election process in the US.
“In January, folk from DC pay pig farmers in Iowa to write a name on paper and put it in a popcorn bucket. This determines who California gets to vote for in March”
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But isn’t “Diner Journalism” being replaced by the lazy scraping of content from Xitter and NextDoor so reporters never have to leave the warm confines of an office?
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Not directly, but this year the numbers are pretty stark! $124M in advertising spending for 110,000 votes. Yikes.
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Not yet. If one wants to make a decent salary from a major outlet as a political journalist in America one is still obliged to occasionally venture out into Real America™ and directly commune with assorted bigots and ignoramuses. This is vital to keeping up the required pretense that one actually gives a damn about people who lack college degrees, who don’t have the means to live in a big desirable city, and who don’t have access to wealthy and powerful people.
It’s a weird form of self-flagellating professional virtue signalling. In my first career I met a number of journalists who were sent to the Iowa caucuses. They uniformly described it as a miserable experience, had nothing but (often nasty, usually classist) contempt for the locals, and saw the actual caucus process as useless and broken. Even so, there was the air of the conflict zone reporter’s camaraderie about having gone through it.
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The nuances of the American electoral system are very difficult for people living in the rest of the world to understand.
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Just not going to talk about how journalists will interview GOP staffers about how badly the public education system is and list them as “concerned mother”? Astroturfing’s a real issue.
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Not laughing-crying enough…
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The bit that confuses me is that you seem to have to have to register as a follower of a particular political party.
What the fuck business of anyone else is it who I’m going to vote for?
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If Americans had an ounce of a chaotic sense of humor, they would register with one party and vote en masse for another.
The electoral college is also something that doesn’t make any sense for me.
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I never understood the conspiracy theory about the FBI causing the Jan 6 riots. Who could have ordered that? Trump was president at the time.
And why would Trump’s “enemies” arrange it? Biden was already elected president.
But then I remember logic has no place in conspiracy theories.
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The so called deep state. Trump couldn’t completely drain the swamp. He was surrounded by backstabbers. /s
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I’ll try to explain at least that little foible: Not every state does that. Registering with a particular party makes you eligible to vote in their party caucus, where they’re selecting the candidate to run in the general election. In states where you don’t have to declare a party, you can vote in any caucus. In states where you do, if you don’t register for one of the two main parties, you’re usually just sitting out that part of the election process.
I know this much, but actually understanding the why of all of it is beyond me, expect it does help ensure the continuance of the two party system.
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But going against common sense is useful when virtue signaling to the cult.
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Also, it’s up to the political parties as to whether or not they even want to have a primary at all, or whether they want to just decide on a nominee by getting their members together at state and national political conventions to decide, which is how some of the smaller parties do it and used to be the way for all the parties.
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It’s a holdover from the 1700’s when vote counting across a vast landscape was logistically hard. Each state would hold their election, then sent a handful of “electors” to travel to DC to cast the votes representing their state’s outcome.
It was an attempt to have integrity in a geographically spread out process, by having actual people represent the outcome. Otherwise they’d have been sending a signed sheet of paper with some numbers on it, and people arguing about whether or not the sheet was accurate, or if the signatures were genuine. By sending a few trusted people to cast their votes, all those quibbling details stayed behind in the state houses.
The group of electors that arrived in DC then served as a check on each other. “Here be the lift of electorf from the Great Ftate of Pennfylvania. Af you can fee, I’m Jamef Fmith, and I can atteft that my traveling companion is Famuel Johnfon.”
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It made sense centuries ago. And why you cannot elect a president, for example, on a sunday? In a sunday a lot of workers could vote. You could also use schools or barracks as voting stations…
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Oh, it is absolutely silly.
My state has “open primaries” which means when I go to vote in a primary election, I get a choice of three ballots, one that has Republican candidates, one that has Democrat candidates, or one that is issues-only.
Where I live leans heavily in the opposite direction of my personal politics, to the point where the party I support rarely has multiple candidates for any given office. So I tend to choose the ballot for the other party.
The fun bit there is that political parties and PACs will sometimes base their mailing lists off which ballot you voted. So they at least waste a small amount of money sending me political mailers.
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