Knowing the score

Yes, hello, I'm back, let's not make a big thing out of it

Nationals Park before the 2019 Congressional Baseball Game. (Noah Frank)

One of the first things any sports broadcaster worth their salt will tell you about broadcasting a game is that you have to give the listener the score every 60 seconds.

This may sound like overkill. Who wants, or needs, to constantly be reminded of that? But on a radio broadcast, there is no score bug. People tuning in and out throughout the game can’t just glance at the screen to ascertain the exact situation, to do the math in their heads of what must have happened to get to that point (another thing the broadcaster must periodically recap), or what degree of advantage or disadvantage their team is facing within both this exact moment, and the for the rest of the game. Besides, people are distracted by any number of other things. You have to constantly remind them of the score.

It’s so ingrained in broadcasters’ minds that, even in the middle of a sentence amidst a bumbling apology that would fail to salvage his job, Thom Brennaman (in)famously told the world “there's a drive into deep left field by Castellanos, it will be a home run. And so that will make it a 4–0 ballgame.”

After all, the score dictates every game action. Why would the seven hitter be bunting here, if not for the fact that his team trails by one in the seventh inning, and the first two batters have reached? We can debate whether or not that’s good strategy, but clearly the context of the situation is what has driven the strategy to be employed. Every intentional walk, every pinch hitter, every move to the bullpen hinges on the score. This all may seem quite obvious and trite, and if you’re wondering why I’m droning on and on about it, it’s that while we do a very good job of explaining and understanding the stakes in sports, we very much do not do so for the real world.

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Our news organizations are particularly bad at telling us the score, out of some misbegotten idea that either we already know it, or that it’s somehow against their mission to present the full reality of how things stand. 

The score must be more concretely defined. When reporting the news, it’s the number of arrests, or expulsions, or deaths, or other concrete actions and outcomes. The score is the laws of the land and the people those laws kill. The score, to paraphrase someone who truly does not understand this, does not care about your feelings. It’s all those feelings that are often reported in place of the score, though, or as seemingly necessary context to keep you from focusing too much on the score itself. 

And yet, our political media fails in a particular way when it comes to election reporting. They cannot stop talking about the score, telling us who is winning and losing, when all they are doing is reporting poll numbers. Polling — and I cannot emphasize this enough — is not the score.

Polls may reflect some aspects of general sentiment, but they are simply a binary representation of the perception of what the score might be, interpreted through a single, nuance-less structure. That is not the score. If anything, it’s more like a betting line.

Unlike the polls, the votes themselves actually are the score. They will — albeit through an antiquated, broken system of elections — define an outcome. There will be a winner and a loser, no matter who you vote for or if you vote at all.

The thing that bothers me the most about the way polling is reported, is that it seems to convince those analyzing it that, in order to win, they need the numbers within that poll to sway toward their particular candidate. In other words, in a poll of registered voters that shows a race at 45% for candidate 1, 45% for candidate 2, 5% for candidate 3, and 5% undecided, the suggestion is that candidate 1 and 2 need to either siphon votes from candidate 3, or convince the undecideds, in order to better their margin.

This is, I believe, not only largely incorrect, but also the basis of so much of our bad political punditry. Ask anyone who works on a campaign and they will tell you the single most important factor in any election is turnout. That’s because, in addition to being imprecise, polls do not reflect some closed system of a fixed number of voters. It doesn’t matter if you’re tagged as a “registered” or “likely” voter — all that matters is if you actually vote, which many people do not, even if they fall into one of the above categories. In 2020, which had the highest turnout rate of any national election since 1900, more than one in three American adults still didn’t vote.

I understand, though, the appeal in thinking that one needs to capture the nebulous middle of the electorate. The emotional tug of being able to change someone’s mind about something as personal as how they vote their values is a deeply intoxicating proposition. It’s the kind of thing you’ll hear a friend or a family member tell the story about several election cycles later. It’s at once a chance to grandstand, while also flexing your moral superiority. But working hard to sway someone to vote against their own predilections once is neither as easy, nor as lasting as getting someone to actually show up to vote and see their power exercised for the first time.

I was struck by an interview I saw with Maryland Governor Wes Moore, late last Thursday at the Democratic National Convention, long after the balloons had dropped and the crowds at the United Center had started emptying into the Chicago night. He said that he had to convince some of his own family members to vote for him. The journalists interviewing him jerked back in their chairs. They didn’t say it out loud, but their body language seemed to ask: surely the first Black Governor in Maryland’s history didn’t have to sway his own family from voting for his Republican opponent? But of course, that wasn’t what Moore meant. He meant that he had to persuade them to vote at all. The family of a historic candidate. Because that’s the apathy with which many people of all backgrounds treat voting in this country. And it’s understandable, given how difficult we make voting, and given that our choices can often feel restrictive to simply greater or lesser evils.

But imagine the feeling Moore’s persuaded family members felt on election night, when the returns came in. When they saw their brother, or nephew, or uncle, or cousin making history. I don’t know any of them, and I don’t want to project too much onto them. I only know my own memories of voting in historic past elections, particularly 2008 and 2020, and how I felt playing my small part in the result.

It is far more important to ensure that your registered voters actually participate and, furthermore, to recruit new voters who already believe in your policies. Softening your goals and moderating your ideas only serves to make you less compelling and differentiate you less from your opponents. It drains enthusiasm from your cause. It makes your constituents less likely to take time off or work, and/or commute across town, and/or stand in long lines on Election Day, maybe in the rain, maybe despite rampant efforts to keep them from participating in their democracy. The way to help them ignore and overcome all that to vote for you anyway is to stand true to your — and their — values.

Put more simply: there are many, many more potential voters out there who are already on your side and just need a push across the finish line than there are sitting on the fence, ready to be swayed, if only you’ll compromise to meet their demands.

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Tim Walz said in his speech Wednesday night that the Democrats were down three points in the fourth quarter, but that they had the ball and were driving. With all due respect to the Governor and former football coach, this is incorrect. The score is 0-0, because the game has not yet begun. All of this is prelude — practice, as it were. The fundraising and door-knocking is all preparation for when early voting actually begins, as early as late September in some states. The polling is just the preseason rankings and projections.

The real game starts soon. If you want to take part, make sure you’re registered. Jim Day will take you the rest of the way home.