“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
Even Mark Twain – to whom this quote is most often attributed – wouldn’t have believed how accurately his comment would have reflected the current state of political prognosticating.
The recent election provides us an opportune moment to assess the value of authentic storytelling to a target audience. 
Frankly, the myopic “horse race” coverage during this electoral cycle did a disservice to the American public. The narrative espoused by talking heads was built around select information and not the full depth and breadth of content available to voters. That’s why roughly half the country was surprised at the outcome on election night, but shouldn’t have been.
Stop me if you heard this one before: This country is facing slow, but steady economic growth and unemployment near eight percent. Under those conditions, no incumbent president has been reelected. That statement is 100 percent true, historically. However, in the current election, it was continually debunked by fact-based data in the form of reliable, comprehensive data.
538.com math whiz Nate Silver accurately predicted the election outcome in all 50 states within a half of one percentage point and within one-seventh of one percentage point in all battleground states. Silver based the probability of the outcome on hundreds of polls from states across the country. Despite the best efforts of the punditry to claim otherwise, this myriad of polls – especially in the all-important battleground states –showed the President with a consistent lead since June.
And boy did this not fit the media narrative built largely on anecdotal (but ultimately useless) “evidence” like the following:
- Momentum
- The enthusiasm gap
- Crowd sizes
- Lawn signs per capita
- County fair animal predictions
Fact: Close polls do not mean the race is a dead heat or toss-up. As New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan explains, “(Silver) clearly says that the closeness of the popular vote does not affect the probability that Mr. Obama will win. They are, simply, two very different things.”
As dead-on as Silver’s assessments proved to be, the results were a victory for those on both sides of the aisle who value facts instead of conjecture or gut feelings. In his op-ed for Newsday, Slate’s Daniel Engber rightly argued the focus needed to be less about the type or party affiliation of journalists who predicted the outcome and more about assessments that accurately foretold the results.
“The New York Times’ Nate Silver didn’t nail it; the pollsters did. The vaunted Silver “picks” – the ones that scored a perfect record on Election Day – were derived from averaged state-wide data . . . That doesn’t mean that Silver’s magic model works. It means that polling works, assuming that its methodology is sound, and that it’s done repeatedly.”
It’s also the point where authenticity enters the picture. Unlike most of us, the professional political pundits working for both political parties have no accountability, at least beyond their partisan employers. They exist to reinforce the beliefs of those who tune in or listen to their stories, as inauthentic as they might be. Others of us in the business consulting world are accountable for the manner in which we portray our clients, not just how many times we get them media placements. Our credibility is inextricably tied to theirs. Reputations matter, and business relationships are at stake.
At WordWrite, we advise our clients to start from a place of truth, tell their stories through experts fluent in the authentic, fact-based language of their organization and constantly read the audience to measure the effectiveness of these messages.
Hardly any of this was evident during election season. Citing one poll instead of a consensus of polls from across the country is not authentic. A pundit with no skin in the game is hardly a fluent storyteller. Finally, using the word momentum like it has limitless inertia is not an accurate way to read the audience’s response to your message, specifically because that message is not fact-based to begin with.
Unfortunately, as conservative author John Ziegler wrote on The Huffington Post, pundits will continue a dangerous practice of furthering a false narrative at the expense of being honest brokers of communication. “First, while you would think that the advent of modern technology and the explosion of polling data . . . would help in making political predictions, it actually does the opposite. This is because having access to so many numbers allows political partisans to cherry-pick which data points they like in order to fit their agenda and preferred outcome.”
Political pundits stand at a crossroads where their cottage industry (admittedly a lucrative one) is threatened by those like Nate Silver, who had his start analyzing baseball statistics. Maybe it’s poetic justice this renaissance comes from the mind of someone who has embraced the cutthroat world of politics at the expense of the pastoral nature of “America’s Pastime” – a game evidence clearly shows has been surpassed in both significance and popularity by the battle-oriented, confrontation-obsessed NFL.
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Jeremy Church is an account supervisor for WordWrite Communications. He can be reached at jeremy.church@wordwritepr.com and on Twitter @churchjeremy.
