Mapmaker, Mapmaker, Make Me a Map: A glut of ‘swing-state’ stories risks inspiring false certainty about the coming election
For a newspaper that believes that a decent fraction of its readers know that Kurt Weill wrote the music for The Threepenny Opera (51 Down in Wednesday’s Crossword), The New York Times curiously assumes complete amnesia when it comes to presidential campaigns. The hanging-chad long count in Florida that decided the 2000 election—down the memory hole. The 60,000-vote shift in Ohio in 2004 that would have made John Kerry president—forgotten.
A front-page article by Michael Cooper in Sunday’s paper was built around this revelation: “An analysis of the emerging electoral map by The New York Times found that the outcome would most likely be determined by how well President Obama and Mitt Romney performed in nine tossup states.” What a stunner for all Times readers who flunked out of the Electoral College in their attempt to master American politics. They must be gape-jawed to learn that while all American voters are equal, those in swing states like Florida and Ohio (both high up on the Times tossup list) are more equal than others.
The primaries are over and the Romney veepstakes are stalled: How often can you write that Rob Portman is solid, boring, and—get me rewrite—comes from Ohio? As an inevitable result, May is Map Month on the political beat. Everyone is out with their proprietary guides to swing states, with Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, and New Hampshire highlighted as ground zero for uncertainty on virtually every list. There are so many exclusive lists of battleground states that Charles Mahtesian, Politico’s national politics editor, felt compelled to differentiate between “hard” and “soft” swing states.