Or Maybe It Was Just This One?

As the 2018 Mid-term Election cycle winds down, with just a few critical national races left to be decided, I reflected on how the cycle interfered with my habits and how I will plan to avoid the disruption in future years. Although I am a Canadian and so ineligible to vote until I am granted US Citizenship, I am heavily invested in the political process here. Given this is my adopted home, it is my intention to be engaged in the process and serve my civic responsibility to be a knowledgeable active citizen.

News Cycles

Saturation News Coverage means every news feed is consumed by election impacts. News is Big Business. News distributors, online and print versions of newspapers, news-magazines, news-channels, blogs, podcasts, and broadcast news infiltrate every corner of our lives. The sheer volume of written and recorded events can be overwhelming. Given the need to feed the beast that is journalism in this country, every insignificant act by every candidate, every candidate's staff and family is reported as if our very existence depends on it.

This is accompanied by a litany of commentary and opinion pieces from a variety of talking-heads who will compare and contrast to an event that happened during Watergate, or the Clinton administration, or during Roman times. It is difficult to separate news from opinion. It is difficult to avoid categorizing actions according to easily applied labels.

This forces us to view news selectively, using news sources we trust. This restricts us to news aligned with our existing biases, stoking frustration, anxiety and hate.

While it is difficult to separate the two, I want to focus on the events as opposed to the manufactured outrage that results help me to keep balanced. I can then try to reflect on what impact the events have on my understanding of the policies being proposed and the values they represent. I need to avoid spending too much time absorbing commentary and develop my own opinions of the events. In this way, I hope I can focus on the news without being unduly agitated by the news.

Social Media

Social media has been in the news throughout the last two years as amplifiers of messages, many designed to incite division between Americans. There are two effects on our daily habits. The first is the animosity we feel resulting from the messages being delivered. We are emotionally affected by the extreme arguments, priming our fight-or-flight responses, perhaps driving us to act by sharing or commenting on posts that conform to our beliefs or contradict them.

It is clear that social media is a poor source of news but an excellent source of ranting and raving.

We need to be wary of how we react. Sharing our personal opinions by amplifying social media messages, while an exercise in free speech, risks encouraging others to create impressions of us that could haunt us later, perhaps without being aware.

We need to time-block our access to social media, just as we should time-block returning phone calls and answering e-mail. Our desire to jump to see the next tweet feeds our physiological response in exactly the same way. Combined with the emotional reactions to the messages themselves, this creates a cocktail or neurochemicals that could take valuable minutes from your day.

Polls.

Polling creates a spectator-sport mentality. We watch the ebb and flow of poll results published by various outlets almost daily. We attempt to discount the negative polls and cheer the positive ones. We place inordinate emphasis on the movement of single point changes as if they indicate a trend in favor of our own favorite candidate or party, notwithstanding the fact that the margin of error on the polls are greater than the differences.

Polls reflect popular vote, which is really not the driving force of winning elections. For example, national polling results in the Presidential election fail to recognize that it is electoral college votes by state that matter. Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 2% nationally, but Trump is President.

Polling is a critical political tool and polling is very relevant to individual candidates in their own races. They need this data to manage their resources and decide how to ensure to get their supporters to the polls. Polls are also marketing tools for parties, to activate their supporters and engage them in the horse race. But for the most part, polls feed the news cycle, as each poll is analyzed ad nauseam for trends of demographics and historical significance. This is the reason news outlets fund polls.

Polls are an attempt to keep score during the campaign period until there is a real score election day. They are akin to playing fantasy football with no weekly games to align the game to reality.

I conclude that polls are not worth following and the commentary on polls even less so.

The Campaign

Campaign advertising dominates the airwaves, often with caustic negative advertising, intruding on every attempt at leisure.

Attempting to understand the candidates’ positions buried in the noise of misleading rhetoric.

A series of sometimes complicated propositions on the ballot, requiring you to study to ensure the wording an intent of the proposition is understood. Some of the propositions have unintended consequences that may affect your community for decades. In some cases, it is difficult to ascertain whether a yes vote means what you think it means.

Election Day

There are no meaningful results until the polls start closing. Exit polls suffer the same biases and shortcomings as other polls. The primary purpose of exit polls is to determine if the issues people were concerned about during the campaign are borne out when they actually vote in order to reduce the uncertainty of the pre-election polls.

Election night vote counting is really election week vote counting. The decision in the really interesting races will not be completed until the wee hours of the next night and maybe not even then.

Given the sheer number of elections across the country, election night coverage is really somewhat inane. While there is an attempt to illustrate trends and discuss impact as results flow in, it is really nothing more than a survey of various races around the country in an attempt to be the first network to choose the winner correctly.

I will turn off news feeds and social media and follow the results as they arrive. Then I will go to bed at the normal time and find out how it all ended the next day.

Voting

To vote is our greatest challenge and greatest responsibility as citizens. In spite of the obstacles, we need to be confident we nominate the people who will represent us as would wish to act. In the case of propositions on the ballot, we have the opportunity to act, to create the society we want and to leave to citizens who follow us. This is not the time for passive aggression.

Ballots are often difficult to understand. Florida, not for the first time, may have affected the outcome of an election because of the layout of a ballot in Broward County.

Casting a ballot may mean facing long lineups, inconvenient polling locations, poorly trained or misinformed staff at polls.

I resolve to vote as early as I can. This will give me the chance to vote correctly given the complexity of the ballot. It will save most of the voting day aggravation.

My Takeaways

Election cycles consume a full year every other year, with a crescendo as we approach election day, and then a couple of weeks or more of post-election impact analysis.

It is an important process. But it can also be all-consuming. I need to contain the impact to the essentials of the process, so I can continue to do what I need to do achieve my goals. Upon reflection, I resolve to manage the impact of elections on my productivity and habits through the following:

1. Limit news to the coverage of events rather than the reaction of partisans and the commentary of talking heads.
2. Limit my social media connections to friends and family and limit my exposure to specific times of the day.
3. Ignore generic polling.
4. Review the candidates and propositions of my local ballot to be confident they reflect my values as objectively as possible.
5. Vote as early as possible.
6. Ignore election day until the polls close, and even then only look at the overview results and local races.

I expect the 2020 election cycle will raise the intensity of the of rhetoric. I plan to apply these principles to help keep perspective, manage the emotional roller coaster, and remain focused on my goals. I anticipate being  an eligible voter by then so I expect to be a fully informed and participating elector, and I look forward to that challenge and responsibility.