Pothole Prairie by Tim Engstrom

Election Day has come and gone. Some of the candidates the Tribune Editorial Board endorses were elected and some weren’t.

That’s fine with us. If anything, we at the Tribune don’t pretend that the endorsements we hand out are some kind of forecast for the results. We believe the endorsed candidates will be best for the community as a whole, but that doesn’t mean we feel the readers of our publication are sheep who will follow our endorsements. If anything, our readers are intelligent, educated types, the kind of folks who regularly vote in elections major and minor. And we all know educated people have opinions — not snap judgments but decisions formed after hearing the views, interests and facts of the matters at hand.

No, the reason we endorse candidates is to assist in the formation of opinions. Disagreement is just as valuable in the formation of a person’s opinion as agreement. Who hasn’t formed a solid viewpoint after disagreeing with someone else’s statement?

What’s more, they encourage participation in the democratic process and show that the newspaper cares greatly about the direction of the community.

Howell Raines, former editor at The New York Times, said: “A candidate endorsement is not an attempt to dictate to the reader what he ought to do. It’s more a reflection of our feeling that we have an obligation to be part of the civic dialogue. We have a specific obligation to our readers to let them know what our collective wisdom is.’’

The editorials the Tribune produces on a regular basis are an age-old newspaper tradition. In fact, editorials are the oldest part of newspapers. Newspapers grew out of pamphlets that were circulated among the people, such as the ones by Thomas Paine in America’s colonial times. We now consider this journalist one of our Founding Fathers, as he crystallized into words the cause for rebellion against the British.

I want to add that just because this or any newspaper makes an endorsement, it doesn’t determine how the employees at that publication vote. It doesn’t even mean the members of the newspaper’s editorial board are obligated to vote in alignment with the endorsements, either. The endorsement, like the other editorials, are institutional opinions — collectively formed with a sense of what’s good for the broad community taking in multiple issues. Meanwhile, an employee, even one on the editorial board, might cast his or her vote base on a singular, specific issue completely in odds with the endorsement. The Tribune has no control over how employees vote.

 

How to forecast an election

Some of the races in this election season were incredibly close, but for the most part, it was easy to tell who would win. Big race or small, it all comes down to which candidate does a better job of politicking. That is to say which candidate raises a higher profile — name recognition and message recognition. Voters want to know the candidate and know what the candidate’s message is. Voters want to be wooed.

Most of the time, it doesn’t come down to whether the message is good or bad. It comes to down simply getting it out in front of the public better than the other candidate — advertising, news publicity, signs, door-knocking, being in debates, on and on. There are other factors, such as the state of the economy, that can push voters in one direction or another, but, for the most part, people who triumph in elections may or may not be good at being elected officials, but they probably are good at being politicians.

“Why did I lose?” some candidates might be asking themselves.

Did you door knock? Did you paint the town with signs? Did you purchase print and broadcast advertising? Did you push supporters to write letters to the editor? Did you seek to make your message win over the court of public opinion more than the opponent? Did you just sit back and watch election season go by, letting the chips fall where they may or did you truly campaign?

 

Tribune Editor Tim Engstrom’s column appears every Tuesday.