At the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Thomas E. Patterson is something of a rare breed: a political scientist. The Shorenstein Center, even more than the Kennedy School itself, is as much a practitioner’s retreat from Spin City as it is a haven for scholars. But Patterson, whose Kennedy School appointment is Bradlee (as in Ben Bradlee, the legendary Watergate-era editor of The Washington Post) Professor of Government and the Press, is not a former reporter or press secretary, not a retired columnist or speechwriter. He is a University of Minnesota Ph.D. and former Syracuse University political science professor who has written two introductory texts on American government. Of more interest to the Shorenstein Center, which he joined in 1996, Patterson has also studied the triangular relationship between politicos, the press, and the public for nearly 30 years–though never more closely than during the 2000 presidential election.
During that year, Patterson’s Vanishing Voter Project traced, through weekly surveys of 1,000 respondents, the political engagement of American voters, based on what they knew, thought, and actually did over the course of the campaign (i.e., paying–or not paying–attention, volunteering, contributing, and, ultimately, voting). Now, Patterson has combined these massive survey findings with his own powerful analysis of trends in parties, campaigns, and media coverage developed in three previous volumes–The Unseeing Eye: The Myth of Television Power in National Elections (1976); The Mass Media Election: How Americans Choose Their President (1980); and Out of Order: How the Decline of the Political Parties and the Growing Power of the News Media Undermine the American Way of Electing Presidents (1994)–in a new book, The Vanishing Voter: Civic Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty.
The phenomenon Patterson tries to explain is the decline in voter turnout and even general knowledge of politics at a time when educational levels are higher than ever and the information revolution has flooded the airwaves (and fiber-optic lines) with news and analysis. He claims that deepening citizen disengagement from presidential politics can be traced to the decline of political parties (which made politics understandable to the masses), changes in the structure of campaigns (such as primaries that decide the nominees before most voters are yet paying attention), and a shift in media coverage of politics (toward an “attack journalism” that matches the “attack politics” of candidates).
But it’s not only in national politics that voter interest is on the wane. So, on the eve of an election for governor and other constitutional offices as well as the full Legislature, I sat down with Tom Patterson in his Kennedy School office and asked if the same, or similar, trends are dragging down state politics as well. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.
CommonWealth: The research you did for your book, The Vanishing Voter, is national in scope, but has considerable relevance for politics and civic life on the state level as well. For instance, you note the decline in voter turnout in presidential elections over the past several decades. These national numbers track the percentage of eligible voters–citizens over age 18–which includes those who are not registered to vote. But when I looked at Massachusetts gubernatorial elections, I was surprised to find out that turnout even of registered voters has declined over the last three elections–from a high of 75 percent in 1990 to 57 percent in 1998. And voter participation seemed to have little to do with the competitiveness of the contest: Turnout in the tight Cellucci/Harshbarger election of 1998 was lower than in the 1994 Weld/Roosevelt match-up, which was a foregone conclusion, and lower, even still, than the gubernatorial elections of ’82 and ’86, which everyone knew were settled in the Democratic primary. In these important state and national elections, why has the voter gone missing?
Patterson: Well, I think there’s a lot of reasons for it. The trend is unmistakable. For 40 years we’ve been on a downward trend. It doesn’t matter much what indicator you look at, whether you’re looking at turnout in presidential campaigns, presidential primaries, midterm elections, congressional primaries, local elections, the trend is downward everywhere. And it’s been pretty steady. There still is some sensitivity to the race, particularly at the presidential level, so there was this bump-up in 1992, I think largely because [H. Ross] Perot was in there stirring the drink. And it was a time when people were very much concerned about economic conditions. Occasionally you do have these bump-ups, but we have had this really steady downward trend. I think we have to look to a couple of areas for explanation, and within them there are a number of threads.
One certainly has to do with the demographics. Two very large demographic trends have played into it. One is the emergence of the X and Y generations. The generation that grew up during the Depression and World War II was an extraordinarily participatory generation. Even in their old age … the turnout rates are very high. This was a generation that was very much affected by the conditions of its youth –the war, the Depression, the sense that you had to participate, you had to be part of the community, you had to contribute to the country as well. I think there was a very deeply ingrained sense of civic duty in that generation. Now we have the X and Y generations, which grew up at a very different time, without that kind of large national cause to pull them into the [civic] arena, and at a time when we’ve had cable television, which has moved them away from public affairs in some ways…. As these people came of voting age, they had less interest in politics, knew less about it, had very little interest in news on the part of many of them. When you take a generation that’s highly participatory and you replace it gradually over time with people who have less interest in and are less nurtured in this notion of involvement, you’re going to have decline. So that’s part of it.
The other large demographic trend is, since 1965, when the immigration laws were changed, we’ve had the largest influx of immigration in the country’s history. Not percentage-wise, obviously, but numerically. This has been an extraordinary period in terms of bringing new people into this society. You’d think … once you took that oath of citizenship, the next thing you would do is show up at the polls. But it doesn’t work that way. It takes a while for any new group of immigrants to be absorbed into the electorate. So as new immigrants have taken up a larger and larger part of the population, we’ve had some decline in turnout as a consequence of that. And then there are these political factors, which is primarily what the book is about.
CommonWealth: In your book, you describe three overarching trends that you see as turning the electorate against politics on the national level. One is the replacement of parties, which organized political debate around big themes and issues, with candidate-centered politics. A second is the rise of what you call “attack journalism,” which treats government officials and candidates as targets to be stalked in pursuit of scandal. The third is the structure of the political campaign itself, which in the race for president drags out the formal campaigning for more than a year but compresses the action into a few widely dispersed events: state primaries increasingly jammed into February and March; conventions in the summer, in which little happens; then a frantic rush from Labor Day to Election Day. Are these same forces, or parallels to them, at work on the level of state politics as well?
Patterson: They’re at work everywhere. One of the things that’s important for an electorate is how easy it is to relate to what’s going on in the political arena–to recognize what’s going on there and see one’s stake in it, to want to be a part of it. What we have seen at the national level and in virtually every state–interestingly, I think the Southern states are a little bit of a different situation–is a weakening of parties, and not only in terms of our party attachments. We’re pretty familiar with that, the rise of the independent voters. Forty years ago independents made up only about 20 percent of the electorate. In 2001, in one poll, they reached 40 percent. So that’s one form of pulling away from the party.
But what’s as important is that we now have more and more trouble thinking about what political parties are all about. I think this is largely due to change in the issues that are part of party politics. The issues for a long period of time were around class–the economic issue–and the question of whether people at the bottom of the economic ladder would be able to get a larger share of society’s economic benefits through government action. For about a century that was the motivating factor in American politics, at least at the national level and in most states. That division was easy to relate to; [it] made it easy to get a sense of what the party differences were and easy to figure out where you stood. If you were a working-class American, the Democratic Party was your party. If you were a small businessperson, the Republican Party was your party. With the success of the New Deal and things like Medicare, Medicaid in the 1960s, in some ways that battle was fought and won. We replaced that clear divide with political conflict that cuts across dozens of issues and lots of single-interest groups. We can connect to politics, and some people do, through one of these issues. You have a lot of people who are motivated by the abortion issue, and that’s a driving force in their thinking about election politics. But for most of us, when we see politics in lots of issues that cut across different groups, or the parties end up doing a little of this and a little of that, that makes it kind of harder for us to think,”What’s it really mean for me and for the country and for the state to have the Democrats in office or the Republicans in office?”
As that clear-cut image of the parties begins to erode, we have more and more trouble relating to politics. One of the big changes that’s happened is that we now have about a third, not quite a third, of Americans who have trouble just talking about political parties and what it means to be a Democrat, what it means to be a Republican. If you can’t talk about these two large creatures that are so much a part of our electoral politics and around which so much of the conflict occurs and the competition takes place and the organization of government takes place, you’ve reduced the incentive to participate.
CommonWealth: Certainly, lining up according to political party settles little in Massachusetts these days. Half the electorate here is unenrolled. The Republican Party barely exists, but that hasn’t stopped the last two Republican nominees from becoming governor. Democrats dominate all other elective offices, but they hardly project a common vision. In the absence of such a vision, candidates can only campaign by making direct appeals to individual interest groups and offering 10-point plans to solve every problem under the sun. The Democrats who vied for the party’s gubernatorial nomination this year fit the description you give of presidential hopefuls, whom you describe in your book as “acting like a department store Santa Claus.”
Patterson: Well, it’s very hard to run for office. If you’re a candidate running for office today, you don’t have this stable party with a stable party base. It was often said in the ’40s and ’50s you really didn’t have to campaign. You campaigned because it was expected that you would campaign. If you could track the polls across a [campaign season], there was very little change. By mid-summer you could pretty well know who was going to win, and it usually fell along party lines. But that’s not the way our politics are conducted now. It certainly isn’t the way nominating politics are conducted. The parties have very little voice in the nominating process. It’s up to the candidates. And so, as a candidate for nomination, particularly, the only way you get there is to appeal to the various groups, the issue constituencies and the like. You’ve got to make promises. As a candidate you get out there and you make promises and promises and promises. Groups demand these, and we as voters demand this of our candidates. When they talk about our issue, of course, we’re interested. But when we see them talking about dozens of [discrete issues], we begin to think that is what the game of politics is all about. It really doesn’t have a core to it. I think that makes it harder for us to relate to what’s happening in the political arena. In polls, when you ask Americans, “Do candidates make too many promises?” they say, “Absolutely.” “Do they intend to keep them?” “Absolutely not.” The irony is that candidates actually do go about trying to keep the promises.
There’s also the attack politics. If you’re a candidate and, especially in primaries, you’re trying to work in a field of five or six, you have to tear at each other. And when they tear at each other, it works. When people hear an individual criticism and it makes sense to them, they understand it, they connect to it, they don’t object to it. But when they see campaign after campaign after campaign in which attack politics seems to be the order of the day, then politics looks less appetizing. It seems like a game of tearing other people down rather than building up ideas and talking about governing. For some people, that diminishes their interest.
CommonWealth: How has the press contributed to this process of political estrangement? When I look at what we’re getting in the Globe and the Herald and a host of regional newspapers, there’s a lot of coverage going on. There’s a lot of information around. Candidate speeches and announcements of plans for education, health care, the environment, etc., get covered, but they only get played up if the reporter finds some way to poke holes in the plan. And the policy blueprints never get the coverage that is given to campaign gaffes and missteps. I think of the Globe and its coverage of Bob Reich’s crime plan, when they found that the ostensibly tough gun sentence he was proposing was actually less severe than current law. Or the two-day story that the Herald got out of the Reich “Reform Express” campaign bus not getting its inspection sticker. And nothing gets bigger play than a story that rings of hypocrisy. Take the Herald‘s skewering of Warren Tolman, the publicly financed candidate, when it turned out that the developer who bought Lakeville Hospital at the state auction to fund Tolman’s Clean Elections campaign was one he had represented as a lawyer in private practice–even though there was no suggestion that Tolman had anything to do with the Lakeville Hospital deal. It also strikes me that the coverage seems most critical early in the campaign, before voters have really gotten a chance to know the candidates. For instance, it was only two weeks after Mitt Romney announced for governor that the Globe printed a 3,000-word story suggesting he was exaggerating his role as savior of the Olympics. By the time the Globe introduced the candidates formally, in big profiles–Mitt got his on August 11–all of them had had mud splattered on them in one way or another. Is this any way for the press to draw spectators onto the political field?
Patterson: I think Massachusetts voters are lucky in one sense: The media here are still interested in politics, so they provide a lot of political coverage. There are still a few cities that are like this. You go to Chicago and you read the Chicago newspapers and there’s lots of politics in the newspaper. The same with Boston. Sadly, in large parts of the country politics has been downgraded as a news subject. There was very little coverage at all in the local media, for example, in the California [gubernatorial] race last time, and there’s been very little so far this year. There are many communities in California where you wonder whether there’s a race going on. I think Massachusetts voters are very fortunate to have a media that’s still interested in politics and provides a lot of coverage. They’re an exception in that way.
Where they’re not an exception, where they fit the national trend, is in the trend toward the negative. Attack politics has its parallel in attack journalism. Over the last 30 years or so, the press really has turned on the politicians and turned on the political process. I think there are lots of reasons for that. Vietnam and Watergate helped poison the well between the press and the politicians. But journalism, too, has changed. It’s much more [put] the journalist at the center of the action in the way they weren’t before. A good indicator of that, from the 2000 campaign, is on the evening newscasts, where the journalists who covered Gore and Bush had six minutes [of airtime] for every minute that Gore and Bush spoke. As the journalist’s voice has become the larger part of election news, and news generally, news has become more negative about politics and the political process, because that’s the take of the journalist on politics. The positive voice in the past really was the newsmaker’s or the candidate’s voice, and as that voice has diminished, so, too, has the positive coverage of politics.
For the journalist, the question of education in Massachusetts is recognized as an important issue. The candidate makes an important speech about it. It will be a one-day story. But that’s not quite like a gaffe or a blunder. That’s got some real news in it; that always has some titillation to it, something that really is attention-getting. It allows the journalist to put the candidate on the defensive, so you end up with a running story. Policy stories never are running stories; they’re one-day stories. These blunders are running stories. You get two, three, four days. If you look at recent campaigns, whether it’s at the state level or the national level, these gaffes and blunders have been so much more a part of the coverage. An example from the 2000 presidential campaign: If you look at the evening newscasts and the coverage of foreign affairs as it related to the election, what Bush and Gore were saying about the world and what they would do in foreign policy, in the entire general election campaign it got less coverage from the national press than, in the final few days of the campaign, the coverage George Bush’s arrest 25 years earlier for drunken driving received. The [latter] one is a classic media story: A candidate made a mistake, tried to hide it, so [you] bring it out and make it a running story by forcing the candidate to at least acknowledge it, letting the opponents kick in and all of that.
That’s where the news has gone, and it’s diminished politics, diminished our leadership, diminished our institutions. It’s contributed to Americans’ distrust of politics and politicians. One of the things that our study showed was that if you diminish that trust in politics you also diminish the incentive to participate. You might think that a public dissatisfied with their politicians and their institutions would want to jump into the political arena and fix it. That may be one response. [But] for most people, it means backing away from politics and not participating.
CommonWealth: I’m also intrigued by your analysis of how the structure of the campaign can squander rather than build voter interest in politics and elections. For one thing, you suggest we hold too many elections, and in too many years. We certainly hold a lot of them in Massachusetts. Here, legislators, like congressmen, are elected every two years, even though most of them run unopposed in those elections, and rarely a year goes by without a handful of special elections to fill the unexpired terms of lawmakers who leave office. Constitutional officers are elected at the time of congressional midterm elections–not presidential elections, which turn out more voters–while city elections for mayor and city council are held in odd-numbered years, and municipal elections under town-meeting government are held in the spring, not even on the traditional Election Day. Are voters simply overloaded by too many votes in too many elections they can’t possibly understand?
Patterson: I [do] think we overload them…. Ninety percent of Americans say they have a duty to vote. But when you keep calling people out, again and again and again, it’s hard to sustain that interest, to convert that sense of duty into actually participating. Oftentimes, for some of these smaller elections, you [only] become aware of them when you’re driving past the neighborhood polling place and you see some cars parked there. The Europeans do it differently, and there are reasons why we have more elections than they do. We’ve got a federal system; we’ve got strong local government. But in an earlier part of American history, these elections were more closely joined. Elections for governor and elections for the presidency were held in the same year. Now, in the overwhelming number of states, they’re held in separate years. The states deliberately moved them out of the presidential year so they wouldn’t be contaminated by presidential coattails. It was officials manipulating the scheduling of elections to make it easier for those who were entrenched and in power to hold onto power. So I do think that we have too many elections–or at least we have too many election dates, let me put it that way. We ought to combine some of these to make it easier for people to participate. And primaries–we’re the only major democracy that has primary elections. I think primaries are increasingly difficult for people to connect to, in part because there’s less news coverage of the primaries. They seem less salient. And one of the areas where participation has really declined is in primary elections. The effect of primaries is essentially to ask people to go to the polls twice to vote for the same office. No other country, no other major democracy, does that.
I think the way that we run our campaigns, they seem to last forever. You think, on one level, maybe the longer the campaign, the more exposure you’ll have to the candidate, the more you’ll learn about the issues, so come Election Day the better understanding you’ll have of your choice. Well, it doesn’t quite work that way because we don’t work that way. We can’t maintain constant attention over eight, nine, 10 months, whether it’s a campaign for governor of Massachusetts or the presidential campaign. So the campaign kind of runs in fits and starts. We sometimes get pulled into these things around conventions or debates or the entry of a major candidate into the race, but then we’re told to go away for a while…. It would be one thing if we could pay attention in February and everything that we picked up then [we retained so that] when we paid attention again in June, we just picked up where we had left off, but we don’t do that. You’ll have people going to the polls on September 17 who have been exposed to six, eight months of the campaign who won’t remember those things that happened in April, even though they are as relevant, in some ways maybe more relevant, to the choice that they have to make. A lot of important things about the campaign come out very early when people are less interested, paying less attention.
One of the ironies of the modern campaign, even though it’s longer, it’s more expensive, it provides more communication on some level–all the polls indicate that voters are no better informed, and by many indicators less well informed, than they were 40 and 50 years ago. And that was a high-school educated electorate. In fact, 50 percent of Americans in the 1950s did not even have a high-school education, and yet that electorate was better informed than the college-educated electorate of today.
CommonWealth: You argue in the book that campaigns are at once too long and too short. We stretch out the campaign over many months but don’t give enough guideposts for keeping people’s attention and building up that accumulated store of knowledge that will help them to make their choice. I’m wondering how that timing issue works out in state campaigns. In the Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign, Republicans hold their convention in April, the Democrats in early June. The candidates have to get 15 percent in those conventions to get on the ballot, so the gubernatorial campaigns have to begin basically a year ahead of Election Day. When Bob Reich announced his candidacy in January, there was a lot of talk that he was getting in too late to get his 15 percent. After the party conventions there are no other events, other than those that are contrived by the candidates themselves, to engage public attention all summer. Then Labor Day comes along, the traditional starting gun for the public campaign, but that’s just two weeks before the primary. After the primary, the nominees have just seven weeks to make their case to the public. Would Massachusetts voters be better served by having conventions, primaries, and Election Day more evenly spaced in a shorter campaign season?
Patterson: Well, I think so. I think the structure of the campaign today is primarily for the benefit of the candidates. It really is what works for candidates rather than what works for voters. In the self-starting system that we have, a self-starting system of candidates, you need time to line up the money, line up the support. You need months, especially if you’re coming from a less well-established position, to put yourself in place to have a possibility of winning the primary. That tends not to work very well for the voters. At both the presidential level and at the state level it would be better if we could run campaigns that were more compact. For example, in Massachusetts, if both parties held their conventions in August and then you had the primaries in mid-September, that actually would be a lot better for the voters because the conventions will pull them in, in part because the news media pick up their coverage around the conventions. It gives them an event to focus on, and you’ll get a running story around the conventions because it’s a several-day affair. And if both parties ran their conventions in August, you’d draw the people in close enough to primary day.
So if we could somehow think more about what’s good for voters and less what’s good for candidates, I think it would go a long way toward improving elections as a time for the public to participate in politics…. In a statewide election, 10, 12 weeks is enough time for the voters. If they’re paying attention, a campaign of 10 to 12 weeks is far superior to one where they’re only relatively attentive that lasts the full year. There’s no comparison between the two. If you can involve [voters], they don’t need a lot of time. But if you’re going to bore them to death in the process of getting to a November Election Day, then they need a lot of time–and probably even when you get there, they’re not going to be informed. So I think we need to think harder about structures that are voter-friendly as opposed to candidate-driven.
CommonWealth: A lot of what you did during the Vanishing Voter Project was survey voters and potential voters throughout the course of the long presidential campaign of 2000. You discovered, it seems to me, a number of events and moments in the course of the campaign that authentically did draw voter attention and did educate the electorate. You found, for instance, that major party conventions–even though they don’t make any difference any more, in the sense that the nominees are already chosen, and the conventions themselves have become elaborately choreographed showcase affairs–do command voter attention. People do learn a lot from having that direct exposure to candidates, from listening to the speeches and hearing what the candidates are about. Likewise, the televised debates in the fall–even though there’s much haggling over the ground rules, who’s going to run them, how are they going to be conducted, in whose interest is it to participate and in what sorts of formats–you say that these face-offs are tremendously helpful to voters when it comes time to vote. What should we learn from those findings that would help us do a better job of elections in Massachusetts?
Patterson: I think these key moments, these key events, are very important in thinking about the campaign, because in some ways voters think about the campaign that way. You go along day after day during the course of the campaign and the news coverage is there and you’ll pick it up from time to time, but it doesn’t draw you in the way a major event like a convention or debate can draw you in. Also the news media tend to treat those events as larger moments in the campaign and so the overall volume of election coverage increases. That also helps to get the voters’ attention.
We haven’t thought much about how to nourish these parts of the campaign. Networks have been cutting way back on their [national] convention coverage. They argue that the audience is declining, but the fact is, if you cut back on your coverage the audience is going to decline automatically. So you’ve got a chicken-and-egg problem here. In local campaigns, there have been cutbacks in debates. Broadcasters, for lots and lots of reasons, are less interested in covering politics and putting resources into the coverage of politics; the public service side of broadcasting has been diminished for lots of reasons. They look at things like debates as a burden on them in loss of advertising dollars. But these debates are very important to the public and, in my judgment, they are part of the public-service responsibility of broadcasters.
In Massachusetts this fall there’s going to be one [televised, prime-time] debate between the Democratic contenders [sponsored by a consortium of print and broadcast media], and there are going to be three general-election debates. That’s barely sufficient. It’s not hard to imagine a larger and more substantial debate agenda. I think the Weld-Kerry debates [in the 1996 US Senate contest] were a marvelous model for what broadcasters can do for an election. That [series of seven televised debates] helped to interest people in the election, to inform people about it. What was interesting was, the audience was there. It wasn’t as if somewhere about [the third], people said, “We’re not interested anymore.” The audience stayed tuned.
We need the help of people like broadcasters to play their public-service role. We give them a license. They pay almost nothing for it. It’s worth millions of dollars to them. There’s a responsibility that attends it. I think that’s nowhere more obvious than in an election campaign. These are the times that we, as a public, come together, have an opportunity as a community to voice our position on the direction of government. We simply need to strengthen these parts of the campaign, because they’re the things that make it easy for the voters to hook into the campaign.
CommonWealth: Finally, I want to ask you to make a prediction, not to predict who’s going to be the next governor of Massachusetts, but on the level of public participation. We’re sitting here before Labor Day but in the midst of a campaign that’s been very lively, involving a number of candidates with extensive coverage in the news media of all sorts. This is the first election for an open governor’s seat in a dozen years. Should we expect to see the kind of turn-out we saw in that 1990 election–75 percent–or are we likely to set a new low, with barely half of registered voters sufficiently engaged in the campaign to drag themselves to the polls?
Patterson: Well, I think Massachusetts will do better than half, but I don’t think we can look forward to a high-turnout election. Some people thought in the aftermath of September 11–when you had this really strong patriotic outpouring and 80 percent of Americans on their home, vehicle, or lapel flew the flag–that might translate into higher turnout in elections. But the first elections after September 11, last fall’s elections, had quite low turnout across the country. The two high-profile gubernatorial races of 2001, the New Jersey and Virginia races, actually had turnout that was down from what it was four years before that. From all the reports that have come in so far, it looks like the primaries in 2002 will set a new low. So I don’t think we can look forward to a high-turnout election. I think what’s a little uncertain is, this is going to be an exciting race. I think September 11th will be close enough to the fall elections that we’ll have a lot of people saying, let’s show up at the polls simply to show that democracy is alive and well in America. I think there’s a lot at stake in the midterm congressional elections. The [US] Senate could easily go either way, and probably the House, too. A little bit of an economic downturn actually kind of boosts turnout. So there are a couple of reasons for suggesting that turnout probably will hold its own and might even gain a little bit. But that’s a short-term perspective. I don’t see anything out there to reverse the long-term trend. Voter turnout has been declining; it’s probably going to continue to decline. What is it that would turn it around? I don’t think we see any easy answers to that question.