I am, if nothing else, a creature of habit.  I do the same thing every morning: I get up at 5:30, drink a glass of water, make coffee, fire up the TV for background noise and get on the computer.  I read the NY Times, the WSJ, The Richmond Times Dispatch, the Roanoke paper, Realclearpolitics.com, some IT Websites and then Facebook.  It takes about an hour.  Then I make breakfast – again – the same thing every morning: a single fried egg (whole, not that egg white crap) on whole wheat English muffin with turkey sausage.  Yes, I'm a weirdo.  I don't tell you this to somehow embellish my intellectual credentials.  No, I pass that along just to give you a little background.  

I've watched this election through the lens of these many media outlets and one in particular has bothered me: The New York Times.  I'll admit, I love the Times.  It has great writers, a great food section and some truly amazing people write there.  They report on things that nobody else is talking about.  However, as this election progressed, I really began to feel that the Times migrated from reporting on the Republican process to sniping at it.  I played along for awhile – it really was a 15-ring circus after all.  However, when Trump was nominated that sniping turned to full-on assault.  It's part of the reason that they missed the "Trump Quake".  They were so invested in defeating him they were blind.  Indeed, I'd argue they contributed heavily to Hillary's loss.  Sure, their editorial page has been left-leaning the entire time but if you actually read the Times the staff stuff was good.  That changed this time around – they forgot their mission.

Take, for instance, their headline this morning:  "Democrats, Students and Foreign Allies face the reality of a Trump Presidency"

Now, it's not wrong but contrast that with the Wall Street Journal:  "A New Political Order"

The first is all boo-hoo special snow flake and the second is a statement of fact.  Someone needs to take the helm at the Times and help Make Them Great Again.  Newspapers and reporting are crucial….just crucial….to the health of our Country.  Look, I don't feel that Fox was ever "fair and balanced" either but Fox is always going to be Fox and TV is a different media than print.  The Times – and our other great newspapers – doesn't have that luxury.  They need to do hard reporting – the kind that roots out corruption and helps our citizens understand what the hell the politicans and our other leaders are doing.  They need to get it together.

While we're on "The Media", in talking to people about this election cycle almost everyone decried the lack of a local paper.  Did you know, for instance, that the Land Use committee of our very own City Council has decided to initiate a Comprehensive Plan update that could add somewhere around a THOUSAND condo's to the intersection of Euclid and Liberia?  Do you think traffic is bad on Liberia now??  

My point in bring that up is not so much to beat up politicians (although they may deserve it) but it's this:  Who knew that happened?  Is there a way to make some sort of news site on the internet with a handful of volunteers?

 

 

So, we're getting on down to the wire.  This is going to be a unique election in Manassas: really the first November election that is highly contested with complete slates on both sides.  It's such a big deal because five (?) times more people in Manassas vote in November than ever did in a May election….so the methods employed have to be a lot different than when I ran.

See, when I ran – just short of ten years ago now – you had to reach about 3,500 voters – tops.  Door knocking was the primary way to reach out to those voters and individual candidates did pretty much all of their own door knocking – I wore out at least two pairs of shoes.  Sarah and Erin helped out some and that's about it.  We had door hangers that we made by hand.  Every one of those things was printed on our own laser printer – 2 to a sheet, cut in half and then had a hole punched in it.  We wrote all of our own content.  There wasn't a Facebook but there was, perhaps more importantly, a news paper.  Candidates didn't advertise much but I remember Mayor Waldron having a billboard at one point.  The candidates did have differing views of what the world needed to look like but I do not recall it ever being ugly.

Fast forward and we have had one November election for Council but only four people ran – everyone was still figuring it all out.  This year, however, is a whole different ball of wax.  There is a presidential election this year and the Council guys are all running at the same time.  I see both parties rounding up a couple dozen folks to door knock and lit drop.  I certainly never had to do that.

In addition, the vagaries of the presidential contest are suddenly very important to down ballot (council) races because people do not "split their tickets" (vote for one party for president and different parties for other offices) much anymore.  In the last election about 90% of voters selected the same party to receive all their votes – if you voted for a republican for governor, you voted republican down the whole ticket……so, suddenly, if the race for President runs off the rails it matters to someone running for City Council !!!  If Hillary is going to get killed in your district and you're a democrat then your hill just got a lot taller to climb.  This very thing could become very important even here in Manassas.

Social media is the other variable.  There are actually a couple of different facets around this item.  The first is this: is activity on social media a useful surrogate for polling?  In other words, if you received a bunch of new "likes" or a broader audience reach on a Facebook page / picture / post will that mean anything in terms of votes?

The second aspect of social media is this: It is insanely effective at spreading information and awareness.  You can't argue that.  However, very little of what I see on there as "news" or "facts" has little to do with reality.  I'd say this: social media is excellent at spreading information and opinion however the source material for a lot of that information is rarely anything that looks much like journalism (Witness the nauseating rise of click-bait).  It remains to be seen how relevant social media can be in a local election.  Can it be a replacement for our dearly departed newspaper?  I think not but time will tell.