Are All Elections Different?

For the legions of foreign correspondents currently plying their trade in Washington and through the key swing states, the 2008 U.S. presidential election is especially enticing.

Interest back home is at unprecedented levels. Now, perhaps as much as at any time in recent history, America’s actions matter to our audiences, on the real battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan or the virtual ones of the global financial markets.

The current landscape of American politics is clearly without precedent. But one of the responsibilities of good foreign reporting is to try to find resonances from other times and places to help anchor one’s journalism. So I have been alert for echoes from some of the more than two dozen elections I have covered around the world over the past twenty years with the British Broadcasting Company (BBC).

The Obama campaign is similar to other campaigns that ran predominantly on a ticket of “change” against a party which had been in power for some time. Both Tony Blair in the U.K. in 1997, and Gerhard Schroeder a year later in Germany, harnessed the power of such a message in unseating center-right opponents who had ruled for more than a decade. If the tide of history is behind a challenger pushing “change,” it is one of the most powerful forces in politics.

But it doesn’t always work. In the British election of 1992, Neil Kinnock ran a similar campaign and lost narrowly to a post-Thatcher Conservative Party which had been in power for 13 years. John Major, who won, succeeded in distancing himself from Mrs. Thatcher, who by then had become unpopular both inside and outside her party, particularly over the issue of greater ties with Europe. Similarly, John McCain has attempted to move away from the Bush administration.

The same election also revealed that polls can be wrong. In the lead-up to the vote, Kinnock’s Labour Party was running level or slightly ahead in the polls. On Election Day itself the party was defeated by more than seven percent in the popular vote. Research done afterwards suggested that significant numbers of people who voted Conservative felt, in the last few days, that Kinnock could not be trusted but had been too ashamed to tell pollsters. The Obama campaign is no doubt aware of this historical lesson.

Another important lesson on the dangers of polling came in Israel in 1996. Despite initial exit polling suggesting Shimon Peres had been elected Prime Minister, when the actual votes were tallied it was Binyamin Netanyahu who emerged victorious. I spent six tough but fascinating years based in Jerusalem. Reminders of the day when Israel “went to bed with Peres and woke up with Bibi” were often given to caution foreign journalists against placing too much trust in Israeli opinion polls.

The Middle East also provided a third powerful lesson in election reporting: the need to be humble and to resist the temptation to overlay one’s own values on the society being covered.

In 2006, in a rare example of an election in the Arab world which was indisputably free and fair, the Islamist Hamas movement won a shock victory over Fatah, the party which had, in effect, ruled the Palestinian people for a generation. Before the election, much of the coverage by the western media, the BBC included, had focused on the issue of Hamas standing in the election at all. Branded a terrorist organisation by Israel, America, and much of Europe, Hamas had carried out dozens of suicide attacks inside Israel, killing hundreds of civilians.

It was entirely right to investigate Hamas and to hold it to account for the brutal killings carried out in its name. But to a certain extent we all missed another, crucial part of the election story. Such was the despair amongst Palestinians at the poor leadership of Yasser Arafat and his officials over the previous decade that they were prepared to vote for Hamas in large numbers, despite the consequences.

It would be fanciful to draw too many comparisons between the voters of Gaza and the West Bank and those in the United States. But it is clear that in 2004 much of the world simply misunderstood what was happening in America and underestimated the forces which led to President Bush’s re-election. Perhaps we were all looking in the wrong place.

So as Election Day nears, all this provides some context for foreign journalists as we try to scythe our way through the forests of spin and unanswered questions which surround any modern election campaign. Are the polls right? How big a factor is race? What impact could a huge youth vote have?

Next week we will have some, if not all of the answers. The 2008 U.S. Presidential election will take its place in the body of collective knowledge which will serve foreign correspondents of this and future generations.

Simon Wilson is a Washington Bureau Chief for BBC News and a 2008 Harvard Nieman Fellow.