Here in the snow-submerged city of Washington, DC, the few people that have been able to dig themselves out from under four feet of snow have been feverishly keeping America stocked with more 2010 campaign coverage than ever.
In the past couple of weeks, as the nation was riveted by primaries in Massachusetts and Illinois, mainstream media and the blogosphere have begun the race to ramp up their 2010 coverage. The New York Times, Politico, and Talking Points Memo are just a few of the media outlets that have stepped up their game in 2010 coverage recently. One wonders if, given the fact that we’re still nine months away from the general election, we all might reaching new heights of campaign obsession.
On February 1, just in time for the Illinois primaries, Politico launched its new 2010 Campaigns page, conveniently located at politico.com/2010. The page is boasting “Full 2010 Election Coverage and Political News” and is like porn for the political junkie. Features include: daily “Morning Score” email updates, maps and calendars encompassing every House, Senate, and gubernatorial seat up for grabs, a Polling Center featuring daily updates on the latest polls on nearly every 2010 midterm race, an aggregated Twitter feed of Politico’s reporters, and in-depth analysis on “races to watch.”
The Caucus, the political blog over at the NYT, also announced yesterday their plans to intensively track the 2010 campaigns over the next nine months, over at elections.nytimes.com/2010. The most prominent feature of this is a set of interactive maps of every House and Senate race in the country and a handy primary calendar.
Talking Points Memo also debuted yesterday their new Polltracker (beta!), which aggregates all the latest polling data from around the country, and even allows the truly dedicated the option of receiving a constant live feed of poll results via Twitter. Of course, no news site is complete without a Twitter account now, since that’s where all the breaking news happens!
The Electoral Map, a political geography blog, is one of the many blogosphere voices ramping up their 2010 coverage as well. TEM blogger Patrick Ottenhoff has been adding additional frequent posts on 2010 coverage, and supplementing it with a Flickr gallery of maps, a Twitter feed of breaking news and updates, and weekly posts on the state of the midterm campaigns.
In DC this is standard during an election year, and I admit I’ve been glued to 2010 coverage myself ever since the Coakley-Brown election started heating up. But is coverage maybe reaching obsessive levels? Why do I feel like a crack addict, going from one primary race to the next? Is there ever such a thing as too much up-and-down election coverage? I’m a true election nerd, but even I feel that election burnout may be looming in the future for some.
Most of all, I worry that the real policy issues of our time – jobs, the recession, two wars, and oh, yeah, that healthcare bill! – are being pushed to the backburner in favor of our collective obsession over the latest campaign gaffe. But if we’re all contributing to it, I don’t see this question being answered anytime soon.
In the meantime, there’s a new WaPo poll out today. You’re welcome.
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