I cannot profess to much success in the way of viral fame. On my social media you will find no thirst traps, no meme-inspired Halloween costumes, vanishingly few “dunks,” “prompts” or other indicators of broad audience appeal; outside of the occasional full-length takedown (Ellen DeGeneres, “Bros”), my vibe online tends to be more “live-tweeting my latest ‘Love Is Blind’ binge.” But I have had one bright and shining moment on Twitter, back when the platform still went by that name.
The day I popularized the term “chartthrobs.”
Laid up in a frigid L.A. apartment with a nasty case of bronchitis, glued to cable news from sunup to midnight, I spent countless hours before, during and after election day 2020 watching wonks like MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki and CNN’s John King and Phil Mattingly dissect turnout: early and day-of, in-person and mail-in, not only in the swing states that decided the outcome, but also the swing districts, the swing precincts. By the time I fired off my portmanteau replacement for the uninspired “map kings,” I possessed a granular understanding of the vote, batch by batch, that surpassed even my fanatical attention to the 2000 election in eighth grade.
Reader, I am not going back. And neither should you.
I say this not because I distrust the analysis on offer, or dislike the personalities onscreen. In fact, it is because I know how easily I could be lulled into another glazed-eyed week fretting over outstanding ballots in Philadelphia or Phoenix that I am staking out my position early, and publicly. I have simply come to the conclusion that there is such a thing as having too much information at one’s fingertips — or at least too much to be able to see the forest for the trees.
Arguably, most viewers of real-time election coverage are the age of majority, and can be trusted to choose for themselves in prime time as well as at the ballot box. In actuality, if the hyper-polarization of American politics and the growing discourse around social media’s habit-forming tendencies are any indication, we politics nerds are no more prepared to set limits without structural support than the teenagers attached to their smartphones in the recent docuseries “Social Studies.” The chartthrob fixation, in 2020 and now, is just TikTok for people on the cusp of a midlife crisis: an obsession that seems harmless until you find yourself at the bottom of the rabbit hole somewhere around 3 a.m.
If we, the media, are to break our own habitual preference for horse-race narratives over policy analysis, for predicting the outcome instead of reporting what it will mean for our communities, we will first need to stop the gamification of elections that we’ve trained consumers of media to expect. And though it may not be traumatizing, like the New York Times’ needle, or misleading, like election-betting markets, the chartthrobs’ increasing prominence in election coverage nonetheless reflects similar propensities. Which is why, this election week, I’m considering my counterprogramming options — with periodic check-ins on Kornacki, King, et al., to see where the count stands.
Theirs may be a horse race of inches, but it is a horse race nonetheless.
