Politics
Is PageGate the Midterm Clincher? Not Exactly
Will the complexities of this midterm Congressional election be reduced to the creepy emails Mark Foley sent to Congressional pages?
By Paul McLeary Tue 10 Oct 2006 04:25 PMIt’s “Super Tuesday” today at CJR Daily, and we’ve been looking at the results of a variety of polls published by major news organizations showing that the Democrats have built commanding leads over Republicans in the midterm elections.
While the polls all showed essentially the same thing — that a majority of respondents are unhappy with President Bush and his handling of terrorism and the war in Iraq, among other matters — it was interesting what some newspapers chose to play up in their reports on the polls: namely, disgraced former Republican congressman Mark Foley.
The inclusion of the Foley imbroglio in each of the poll write-ups got us thinking about the effect the scandal will have on the inevitable Monday morning quarterbacking in the days, weeks and months after the November 7 elections. The media lives for election postmortems, and you just know that pundits are already ginning up theories for why the Democrats won big, won small, or how they again fell flat on their faces when given such widespread public dissatisfaction with the status quo in Washington.
What will be the story of this election? Iraq? Terrorism? The so-called “do-nothing” Congress? Or will it be a mix of all these things, sprinkled generously with a hearty dollop of Mark Foley’s spectacular implosion? Just as we keep reading the nonsense about how Newt’s “Contract With America” swung the congressional elections to the GOP in 1994, will the Foley scandal become shorthand among the press for the complex political and social forces at work this fall?
The New York Times’ Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder, in their article about a new New York Times/CBS News poll, played up the Foley angle, (as did their headline writer, who tagged the piece: “Foley Hurting Congress’s Image, Poll Shows.”)
There’s little doubt that the Foley scandal is hurting the image of congressional Republicans, at least in the minds of poll respondents, but there is considerable doubt as to whether or not it will actually help Democrats win control of one or both houses of Congress.
Take, for example, this admission in the Nagourney-Elder piece: Having hyped the Foley scandal in the headline and up top in the piece, the writers acknowledge that “There has been no change since mid-September in the gap between Americans who said they planned to vote for a Democrat over a Republican in their district this November: 49 percent to 35 percent.” To us, that shows that aside from the ugly atmospherics of the Foley story, it is merely another piece of bad news for the Republican majority, not — at least for the moment — the death knell.
Meanwhile, in the Washington Post David S. Broder and Dan Balz, in a report on a new Post-ABC News poll, give less weight to Foley (at least in the headline), writing that the “Foley scandal, while not a dominant voting issue for many, nonetheless has contributed to dissatisfaction with the majority party’s performance, the survey found.”
The USA Today’s Jill Lawrence, looking at a new USA Today/Gallup Poll, leads with a nod to Foley before concluding that “Government corruption, Iraq and terrorism were the three most important issues [to poll respondents]. Along with their lead on terrorism, Democrats had a 21-point advantage on corruption and a 17-point advantage on Iraq. A 56%-40% majority said sending troops to Iraq was a mistake — the widest disapproval margin in a year.”
And last Friday, McClatchy Newspapers’ Margaret Talev and Eric Black reported that their reading of recent polls shows that the Foley scandal “hasn’t created a voter backlash against Republicans nationally.”
Despite all this evidence to the contrary, each of the above-mentioned articles treated the Foley scandal as if it somehow is swaying the electorate, while at the same time admitting that it isn’t. So keep your eye on the what-happened-and-why narratives starting November 8, because the D.C. press corps seems determined to tie Foley to the larger electoral picture. Our money is on PageGate being given more weight than it deserves.
CJR
