Casting Presidential Contenders (or Predicting Who Will Win in 2008)

Would you like to know who will win in 2008? There is research to determine that answer. Dr. Mark D. Harmon, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville once did an interesting study on presidential elections. In his research he found that “casting” took place in presidential elections. Here’s how he describes it:

Casting is a strong series of candidate expectations expressed by news organizations early in campaigns. Often casting choices are based significantly on early polls (and campaign cash), and sometimes they can become self-fulfilling prophecies as campaign coverage and elections move forward.

In other words, those who score high in polls early get the most media attention. This attention then becomes a prophecy. Consider the following graphs from the recent presidential debates.

Notice that Giulini, McCain, and Romney received the most “talk time” in the recent Republican debate while Clinton, Obama, and Edwards received the most attention in the Democratic debate. Were they not “cast” by the media as the front runners? Here’s the bottom line-those that get the attention, get their message out; those that get their message out, get the win.

As Dr. Harmon points out, “casting occurs in regularly scheduled and significant news stories.” We can, therefore, expect to see the three front runners in each party get the majority of the attention in the media. For those other candidates, Ron Paul, Mike Gravel, Tommy Thompson, etc., it is lights out. Expect to see a number of candidates drop out of the race in the not to distant future complaining about “not getting their message out.” Now you will know why.

Special thanks to Danny McGuirre at http://www.hmtk.com/archives/bias-in-the-media.html for first writing about this.

Technorati : 2008 election, media bias, politics, presidential candidates, research