Manchester Union-Leader

For a while, I thought that newspaper endorsements were irrelevant, that most people didn't care what a bunch of editorial staff writers thought.  For general election Presidential contests, I think this is still true.  This is the case in most state and local general elections as well.

But I do think that newspaper endorsements are valuable in primary elections, depending upon the ideological orientation of the editorial page.  The Washington Post's endorsement of Creigh Deeds may have been the spark that got him the momentum to wallop Terry McAuliffe.  It's no secret that the Post has a liberal editorial page (though less reflexively liberal than the New York Times).  For its Northern Virginia readers, especially in the Democratic enclaves of Arlington and Alexandria, the Post is a very influential political and cultural authority.  Previous to the Post endorsement, Deeds was sort of an obscure, rural Democrat who would seem to have real problems competing in NoVa with McLean based McAuliffe and Alexandria native Moran.  But once the Post gave their seal of approval to Deeds, he became acceptable to NoVa liberals, not to mention a source of curiosity as reflected in the Google search spike Patrick has highlighted.  I guess Democratic primary voters liked what they saw in Deeds.

I think a comparable analogue in recent years was the Manchester Union-Leader's endorsement of John McCain in December 2007.  As you may recall, McCain was left for dead in the summer of 2007 after the failure of Amnesty part two.  McCain never left the race and changed to a scaled down campaign.  After problems with the Giuliani campaign began showing up, McCain had the opportunity to win the 40-45% of the Republican primary voters that shifted between Giuliani and McCain.  Starting in November, McCain began coming back from the dead as many voters were willing to give McCain another chance in light of other campaigns falling apart.

The Union-Leader is perhaps the most influential conservative editorial page in the country behind the Wall Street Journal.  This outsized influence was due to New Hampshire's first in the nation primary and the low tax advocacy by the Loeb family, owners of the paper.  To put it mildly, the Union-Leader has credibility with New Hampshire conservatives.  So when they came out for McCain, it elevated him to serious contender in New Hampshire, and soon after, the rest of the country.

The common element with both endorsements is that they were in primary elections and they were made by papers with well known ideological slants.  Their endorsements were influential because members of each party's ideological base trusted that paper's editorial page as an arbiter of good political sense.  By contrast, the Union-Leader's general election endorsement was virtually meaningless, considering that anyone who likes the Union-Leader was already voting for McCain, while those who didn't wouldn't pay attention anyway.  I suspect that the Post's nearly certain general election endorsement will not have much of an impact either.