No one in the community has asked me about endorsements as election season reaches the final sprint, ballots in the mail. There’s a first.
I don’t remember that happening before. This was a regular question during my year of living Aspen.
The Aspen Times historically had endorsed candidates and positions. But ownership changed, a defamation suit blew the newsroom up, the new publisher was adamantly against it, and I was way too new to push it. Besides, being new, I wasn’t qualified and we were in no position to do the process right.
Getting the question while out and about then was understandable. That fall, we did not endorse candidates as an institution, not for governor, sheriff, the county board, nor Congress in the notorious Third District the size of red Mississippi served by Lauren Boebert.
We didn’t endorse in the spring city council campaign, either, which featured coalitions of candidates representing business interests vs. those backed by half the voting community that lives in affordable housing. Remember second-home owners tend not to be qualified to vote there.
The royal we remained disinclined to endorse, but by then I was familiar enough with the politics to run through my own assessments of strengths and weaknesses, challenge the front-runner to be a bit less vaguely vanilla, point out the alliances, and no doubt annoy plenty of people all on my own.
Before Aspen, I was in Grass Valley, California, for six years. The lore, at least, had the paper that began in 1864 never doing endorsements. I don’t know about that, but it had been decades at least.
Still, even there I was asked each election cycle whether we would be endorsing candidates this time.
There are distinct schools of thought between doing political endorsements or not. Both philosophies are well reasoned, and Grass Valley had long gone with the idea of not presuming to tell people how to vote.
Everyone but me internally was dead against it. I was the “boss,” but in the end I went with the wisdom of my crowd. Among the factors was the polarization in that community between very right and very left, and very loudly so. The Lake Tahoe papers I looked after as well were against it. OK, fine then.
All the elections went well in this period, at least from my perspective. The people who should have won did win. Most weren’t difficult choices for the electorate.
I did write my columns evaluating candidacies and campaign news, and earned the everlasting hatred of the local Republican leadership after we named the officers who went in on a PAC that produced a racist, lying mailer against the Democratic candidate for county clerk, the position in charge of elections. I congratulated them ahead of time for ensuring she would win in a landslide, which she did, and that she would get more Republican votes than her GOP rival. That was closer, but she got a ton of those to win by as large a margin as she did.
I also advocated for voting for Republicans for state office against the supermajority, Democrats for national office, and competent and capable candidates locally, where that actually matters.
Mainly I used the column to argue for the importance in a democratic republic of voting, and to be thoughtful about it. I didn’t endorse, per se, so much as point out where candidates were coming from and how they would fit with the body they were aiming to join.
I view endorsements — whether by papers, prominent citizens, a union — as data points rather than persuasive on their own. No one slavishly looks to the local paper to decide, and papers have no power that way for all the old lore. If their record of candidates getting elected looks too good, it’s because they figured out where the prevailing wind was blowing and followed rather than presumed to lead.
And no smear doing the truly courageous thing and endorsing less popular candidates because they would do the best job for the times.
The Vail Daily ducked endorsements before I arrived. I knew because the paper was founded in 1981 and it was easy to look up. We started with them my second year as editor, and continued through the rest of my tenure.
We developed a process I believe is the fairest and most comprehensive — certainly more thoughtful than an editor, publisher and maybe a reporter chatting, then banging out a royal we piece on whatever whim we were riding. I did plenty of those before arriving in Vail. That was just how they were done at dinky dailies across the land.
At the Vail Daily, we brought in all the candidates for each race for an interview with our editorial board, which at the time was our news staff, along with the publisher, ad director if interested, and marketing director who was very interested. Then we talked it all over, fought like cats and dogs sometimes, and arrived at endorsements that took in at least a little wider thought than just me banging ’em out.
Grass Valley ducked endorsements, but they did something else worth trying here. Why limit an editorial board to only the mopes who work at the paper? Every other year or so, that paper solicited applications from the community among people who would be interested in meeting and talking about all the issues, and forming house editorials from those.
We filled the dozen or so seats at the table with people from the full range of the community. Everyone from high schoolers to senior citizens, employees to employers, different faiths, different politics, different perspectives. Not my idea, but I loved it.
These groups proved over and over again they could discuss the most tender of issues without shouting, stomping out, any of that. We learned a lot from one another.
The editorials from those discussions might have been more even handed than I might have liked from the old days.
But if necessary, I still had my column for lighting fires.
Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.