Misreporting: Social Scientists, Political Commentators, and the Politics of Presidential Selection

A familiar framework for interpreting the politics of presidential nomination, built on an accumulating body of social science research plus the extended observations of experienced commentators, received remarkably little use in the day-to-day reportage of the Democratic and Republican contests of 2016 and 2020 as they unfolded. So this paper begins by sketching out the factional structure of the modern Democratic and Republican parties, along with the bandwagon dynamic that recurrently resolves their factional disputes. It then applies these foundational interpretive factors to the two most recent pairs of nominating contests. What results are four orthodox and recurrent stories that stand in sharp contrast to media narratives that were all too frequently a mix of incomplete basic understandings plus wildly overemphasized idiosyncrasies.