Perhaps we are looking at the end of an era. Nationally of course, the Washington Post and LA Times earned national attention and even drew some editorial staff resignations for decisions not to endorsement in the Presidential race.
Meanwhile, we had been waiting for the Davis Enterprise to drop their endorsements for Measure Q and the City Council. After all, on October 8, the Enterprise endorsed Measure T – the library proposal that is on the ballot.
The Enterprise Editorial Board, such as it is, has cut back on their writing in recently years.
Going back two years, they have run just seven editorials. Two of them were non-candidate related—a piece on the Natalie Corona memorial in October 2023, and a piece on the bomb threats last September (2023).
Other than that, in October 2022 they endorsed Gloria Partida and Bapu Vaitla (both of whom won their respectives seats).
In April 2023, they backed Donna Neville to fill the rest of Lucas Frerichs’ term.
In February they backed Measure N (the school parcel tax) and Sheila Allen for Supervisor.
And then it stopped after backing the library parcel tax.
Candidates for the one contested City Council race told the Vanguard they had not been interviewed and we were told that they wouldn’t be endorsing.
We ran a piece last summer —do endorsements even matter—and it’s a fair question. At the presidential election, they probably do not. There are only a tiny handful of people who are persuadable these days and they seem to make their decisions based largely on idiosyncratic if not altogether capricious reasons.
But City Council is a low information environment—particularly this year.
I have always treated endorsements as signaling events. For example, the local newspapers tend to be “conservative,” as in risk-averse (as opposed to necessarily politically conservative) and have tended to endorse candidates that were considered mainstream and safe.
A good example was the October 2022 endorsement of Partida and Vaitla. At the time, both incumbents were being challenged—Gloria Partida and Dan Carson, in part because of their support for both DISC projects, but it was Carson who had erred by involving himself in the lawsuit and Partida who survived despite being in a district that heavily opposed the project both in 2020 and 2022.
Did the endorsement of Bapu Vaitla over Dan Carson spell the end for Carson? Probably not. But it was another signal that Carson was in trouble—and he was.
The other place where endorsements matter are on even lower information races. Usually there is a handful of propositions that everyone is focused on, and thus it’s easy to know which way you want to vote. However, there are a handful of low information ones or that are misleading or backed by forces you personally consider bad, and knowing who is supporting a measure is helpful information that includes media endorsements.
And of course, I am forever being asked about judges, since most people do not have first-hand knowledge of them, and often judges are reluctant or proscribed from providing certain information.
A lot of people do this informally, they’ll ask a friend, who they know pays more attention to such things, which way they are voting.
I’m of mixed feelings on newspapers punting on such functions. On the one hand, if done correctly, and the editorial board has meetings with all candidates and grills them, it provides the public with key information about a race.
On the other hand, there are of course other ways to do that.
The Vanguard for instance, as a non-profit organization, does not endorse candidates, but tomorrow we will run our eighth and final weekly question and then will likely create some sort of chart showing each candidate’s response to the eight questions and allow the public to figure out for themselves whom to support.
We have slowly seen the decline of small and local news entities. Now we are seeing traditional news outlets increasingly punt on a traditional role. Again, it will be interesting to see how this plays out into the future.
