Two Weeks of Political BS Is the Last Thing We Need Right Now

O ne of the worst things about working in political journalism is that every so often you have to listen to politicians talk for extended periods of time.

I can’t stand presidential debates, especially the too-numerous and too-crowded ones that take place early in the primaries. Issues are boiled down to sound bites; misrepresentations and errors run rampant; the candidates talk over each other and ignore their time limits; the discussion afterward is consumed by pundits scoring the most intemperate arguments that were made and offering “fact checks” that are often as biased and ridiculous as the assertions they’re meant to evaluate.

But party conventions take the cake for useless televised politics. They are professionally packaged infomercials delivering the parties’ own message, with no pushback from moderators or competing candidates: We’ve been sent from heaven to make your lives better; the other guys hate you and everything this country stands for. One rah-rah speech after another; night after night of endorsements from a candidate’s most fervent supporters and most faithful allies, painting the two sides in the most extreme colors possible and often trying to raise their own profiles in the process.

No one who follows politics and policy — even just on a casual basis — can possibly learn anything new from this. And those who don’t follow politics could read up on the parties’ goals from more-reliable sources in a much less painful way: Watching the conventions this year will cost you two to two-and-a-half hours a night of your life over eight nights, crammed into two consecutive weeks. That adds up to maybe 18 hours. Assuming most people sleep six to eight hours a night, you’ll lose an entire day of your waking life to this garbage if you actually consume all of it.

Mind you, I’m not saying the parties or the TV networks are miscalculating the general public’s appetite for convention theatrics. To my shock, the data are clear that lots of people tune in. Each night last week, about 20–25 million people watched the DNC on TV, and that doesn’t include Internet streamers, who might increase the total by 50 percent. Those ain’t Super Bowl ratings, which typically fall around 100 million. But they beat Monday Night Football and even last year’s Big Bang Theory finale.

The typical night’s viewership also comprises a decent minority of the electorate, which numbered about 140 million in the 2016 election — and an Ipsos poll revealed that half of American adults watched at least some part of the spectacle last week. A fifth of the population watched “very little,” while a tenth watched “a great deal.” Only a quarter of us managed to avoid both the convention itself and media coverage of it.

And people don’t just watch this stuff; they change their minds based on it. Historically, candidates have seen a “convention bump” of around five points in the polls after several days of being fêted on national TV, though it’s debatable how much that’s held true this year. Politico and Morning Consult found no bump big enough to measure for Biden, as did CBS and YouGov, but ABC News and Ipsos found that Biden’s favorability rose from 40 percent to 45 percent. Of course, we won’t know for a few days yet what effect the RNC has on Trump’s standing.

Since the average American watches several hours of TV a day and a lot of channels dump their usual programming in favor of convention coverage, maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that so many end up watching or that these insufferable events have palpable effects on the polls. In any event, if people are watching and reacting, neither the networks nor the parties are going to rein all this in. There’s no solution.

But given our rising polarization, the political exhaustion of the past four outrage-soaked years, and the state of the country right now — with a pandemic ravaging both our health and the economy, and cities quite literally on fire — I can’t help but think that we’d be better off getting our information about the election some other way, or maybe just playing video games instead.

And to the one-fourth of Americans who manage to avoid not only the conventions but also the media coverage: I so, so envy you right now.