When you run a presidential campaign that makes it through the primaries, you spend two years building a giant machine with many moving parts: messaging, policy, communications, field agents, transition. The last two weeks before Election Day, that machine finally lurches fully into motion and you find out exactly what you’ve built. We are right now living in that two-week window, the period where all the hard work of building a campaign is either paying off or blowing up. What this means is that the campaigns shake off all the glitz and wheel-spinning and get down to the business of actually campaigning in swing states. The candidates mostly stick to their stump speeches, surrogates try to keep to their strengths, and the parties roll out their time-tested local teams. It’s very difficult to change a narrative at this point in a campaign—especially given that early voting has already started in quite a few states. So for high-level campaign staff, you rely on momentum and planning to carry you through, and you supervise how everything’s going, and you wait to see what America decides. So, yeah. These final two weeks before a presidential election are always strange. I’ve lived through these periods both as an ardent political spectator and as a journalist. And I hope you believe me when I tell you a little secret: the media has no idea what to do with itself during this time. There’s rarely any proper “news” during the last two weeks of a campaign*: candidates are disciplined, messages are honed down to a sharp edge, and campaign staffers are unlikely to try anything especially crazy. My point in all this is to tell you that your instincts right now are telling you to keep an eye on the news all the time. Ignore your … Continue reading Stop Reading the News Right Now: Why the Final Two Weeks Before a Presidential Election Is Always a Media Black Hole