Today, I want to conclude an argument I have been developing over the last few days about the relationship between the media and the horse race. Up to this point, I've asserted that journalists and pundits have a false impression of how voters make their vote choices. One implication of this is that journalists have an impoverished or at least incomplete view of how electoral politics work. Another implication - one that I want to develop today - is that much of the electoral "news" that we encounter is just idle entertainment for political junkies. It is not getting at anything of real value, even if it might appear as though it is.

The media, and politicos in general, have a narrative about this campaign that they have spent a lot of time analyzing and interpreting. It is not about which candidate has the better policies or who is addressing the most important issues. It is about the horse race: who is up, who is down, why they are where they are, and where they are going next.

This is ironic. A discussion of the ins-and-outs of the horse race requires the participation of the broader public. It is implicitly about who has the edge in the upcoming election - and therefore whom the voters prefer and why. So, they have to be in the subtext of any horse race analysis. However, as far as the storyline that politicos have developed goes, it is clear that the voters are not playing along. As a consequence, the whole discussion loses much of its value.

Take, for instance, the lead of Dan Balz's Saturday article in the Washington Post:

LAS VEGAS, Nov. 16 -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's strong performance in Thursday's Democratic debate here will blunt talk that she is on a downward slide and shift the focus to whether Sen. Barack Obama or former senator John Edwards can stop her march to the nomination, party strategists said Friday.

What is the object of this story's narrative? For whose benefit is all of this occurring? It surely is not the voters' benefit. Most of them did not watch the Las Vegas debate, whose record-breaking ratings still did not beat an average episode of The Biggest Loser. They do not pay enough attention to politics to dedicate two hours to such a display. And anyway, they dislike the gamesmanship of politics; even if they had watched, they would have found very little of value in a debate that focused mostly on tactical positioning and jewelry preferences.

So, with whom was Clinton on a "downward slide," the talk of which has now been "blunt[ed]?" For whom will the "focus shift?" The answer is: politicos. Balz's article is actually a story about electoral politics that does not involve the electorate at all! It just pretends to involve it. In reality, this is a story about how a very small group of people - who account for maybe 2% of the voting public, and who have in all likelihood already selected their favorite candidates - reacted to the Vegas debate. The broader voting public is injected to maintain the illusion that the stakes are higher than they actually are.

That is the way it goes for many days' horse race news. There is a false assumption that underlies much of the daily discussion - that what happened matters because it influences votes. It usually doesn't. The campaigns, the media, and the pundits are interacting with one another - but only for the benefit of each other. The voters are usually not involved in this interaction. We pretend that they are to make the story seem like it is about something real - but they usually aren't, and it usually isn't. In reality - the story is often about how political elites react to the ins and outs of the day's news, told as if the public as a whole is reacting in that way. It is a strange combination of autobiography and fiction.

Since I started this blog - I have set about to avoid this type of analysis. I think this is why my analysis of the Democratic race has been so constant. I'll say now what I have been saying for months about the Democratic race. It's basically a two-person contest. I don't think Edwards can win the nomination. It will either be Clinton or Obama. Because of her position in the public mind, a victory in Iowa is probably a sufficient condition for Hillary Clinton to win the nomination. Because of his position, a victory (or at least finishing ahead of Clinton) is probably a necessary condition for Barack Obama. He might still lose the nomination if he wins Iowa - Iowa just makes it a race. But Obama has the money, he has the organization, and he has the message to win the Hawkeye State. The Iowa polls are, as I have argued, not all that helpful in predicting who will win. So - all we can say is that Iowa is a three-person race.

All of this twisting and turning and strategizing - "Novak said this" but "Oh, he's just a GOP shill" - is all just a noisy show put on for politicos by other politicos. When you distance yourself from it - the noise dies down, you can think clearly, and you see that very little about this race has changed in the many months since it started.