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NEW YORK — Underscoring the uncertainty hanging over the presidential election ten days away, two major newspapers, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, have decided in a break from tradition not to endorse either Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump.
Two separate polls by The New York Times and CNN released on Friday have them locked in a tie.
The Times poll showed them both at 48 per cent, with Harris’ lead of 3 per cent in a poll earlier this month vanishing, although it was – like the latest – within the margin of error.
Analysing the poll, the Times ominously wrote, “The result, coming less than two weeks before Election Day, and as millions of Americans have already voted, is not encouraging for Ms Harris”.
The CNN poll had them tied at 47 per cent. The RealClearPolling, the authoritative poll aggregator showed that Harris’ lead shrunk to 0.2 per cent on Friday from the 2 per cent on October 1.
Tellingly, the Times opinion section which is tilted towards Harris, ran an essay on Friday by a highly regarded election statistics analyst declaring that his “gut” feeling is that Trump is going to win.
Nate Silver, who runs the FiveThirtyEight website that was with the Times and is now in the ABC News stable, wrote, “My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats.”
He added the caveat, “In an election where the seven battleground states are all polling within a percentage point or two, 50-50 is the only responsible forecast.”
If the polls are correct – a big IF given their failure in 2016 when they predicted a Hillary Clinton victory – it would appear that neither Harris nor Trump have managed a breakthrough with their intensive campaigns.
Polls showing a setback for a candidate can also have the effect of the base redoubling its efforts and making a late hour impact.
Harris calling Trump a “fascist” and a threat to democracy, and hammering away on his age, his character, his lies, and his instability has not made an impact.
Nor had her stand on nationally legalising abortion or her moderating her policies moving towards the centre, shown any effect.
The star power -- Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Leonardo DiCaprio among others -- she has deployed hasn't yet turned things around.
Trump calling her a “Communist” and also a threat to democracy, nailing her to President Joe Biden’s failures, and harping on illegal migration and inflation, failed to move the needle significantly.
Besides the two newspapers, Teamsters, the powerful transportation workers’ union with 1.4 million members, refused to endorse either candidate even though the majority of workers supported Trump in an internal poll.
The Washington Post’s editorials have been critical of Trump and it had endorsed his opponents, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.
The Post’s publisher, Will Lewis wrote, “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
The paper probably had not dished out endorsements till 1952 when it backed Dwight Eisenhower and began regularly endorsing only since 1976 when it backed Jimmy Carter.
Lewis asserted that the action was neither a “tacit endorsement” nor a “condemnation” of either candidate and said, “We also see it as a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds”.
The newspaper’s union blamed the Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos who founded Amazon, for the decision.
“According to our reporters and Guild members, an endorsement for Harris was already drafted, and the decision to not publish was made by The Post's owner, Jeff Bezos”, it said in a post on X.
The Los Angeles Times is owned by another billionaire, Patrick Soon-Shiong, a pharmaceutical inventor and the founder of a network of medical and Artificial Intelligence startups.
Defending his decision against an endorsement, he said that he had asked the Editorial Board to write an editorial giving “side-by-side” analysis on the candidates’ position, but it had not followed up.
The newspaper’s union also criticised the decision and added that Soon-Shiong was unfairly putting the blame on the editorial staff.
Both the newspapers are privately held by businessmen who had swooped in with their hundreds of millions to save foundering newspapers.
Since their primary interests are elsewhere, there are allegations of conflicts of interests.
Columbia Journalism Review Executive Editor Sewell Chan summed it up that they are “trying to hedge their bets out of fear that their business interests could be harmed during a second Trump presidency”.
But that only strengthens the view that Trump is winning.