US Letter: Historic about-turns see conservative papers dump Donald Trump

USA Today did not hold back. For the first time in its 34-year history, the newspaper's editorial board came off the fence in a US presidential election and urged readers not to vote for Donald Trump in a blistering takedown of the Republican nominee.

“He is erratic. . . He is ill-equipped to be commander in chief. . . He traffics in prejudice. . . He’s a serial liar,” read some of the highlights of its critique.

The editorial follows a spate of national, state and city newspapers backing Clinton, in some cases unprecedentedly, as with USA Today. The Arizona Republic, a newspaper in a state that has only voted for a Democrat once since 1948, endorsed Clinton this week, the first time in its 126-year history that it has backed a candidate from that party.

“A historic endorsement: Clinton,” declared the newspaper above its masthead next to a photograph of the former US secretary of state. “She has the temperament, experience and judgment to lead,” the editorial read.

The Arizona Republic joined the Cincinnati Enquirer and other red-state newspapers the Houston Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News, which were equally turned off by Trump, in breaking with a long tradition of supporting Republican candidates. The last Democrat the Enquirer's editorial board supported before Clinton was Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

“This newspaper has not recommended a Democrat for the nation’s highest office since before World War II – if you’re counting, that’s more than 75 years and nearly 20 elections,” said the Dallas Morning News earlier this month.

The paper's news editor, Mike Wilson, acknowledged in an interview with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, owner of the Tampa Bay Times newspaper, that endorsing Clinton had cost the Texas paper subscriptions.

“Certainly we’ve paid a price for our presidential recommendation, but then we write our editorials based on principle, and sometimes principle comes at a cost,” said Wilson.

Trump hit back, tweeting yesterday: “The people are really smart in cancelling subscriptions to the Dallas & Arizona papers & now USA Today will lose readers! The people get it!”

The billionaire has yet to receive a major daily national newspaper endorsement. The New York Post, a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, offered a tepid endorsement of Trump in April, criticising the Manhattan billionaire's language as "amateurish, divisive and downright coarse".

Other endorsements have come from the New York Observer, owned by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and the National Enquirer, the supermarket tabloid. As the Washington Post noted, even the Libertarian nominee, Gary “what is Aleppo?” Johnson, trailing Trump by double digits, has received more.

Irish-American publisher Niall O’Dowd, a Clinton supporter, backed her in New York’s Irish Voice in April.

“There is a strong anti-Clinton Irish-American lobby out there, so we got lots of negative comments,” he said.

At a time when social media dominates the news cycle and political polarisation drives voters to their ideological bedfellows in the media – conservatives to Fox News, liberals to MSNBC – do press endorsements truly matter?

Research shows that endorsements have a marginal effect, if any, on election outcomes, with one exception: when a paper bucks a trend.

Brian Knight, a professor of economics at Brown University in Rhode Island, co-authored a study published in the Review of Economic Studies in 2011. It found that a traditionally neutral paper giving its backing to a candidate could induce 2-3 per cent of its readers to switch position, while a paper that broke with a long tradition of supporting one party could flip up to 10 per cent.

“If a newspaper makes a very surprising endorsement, that can have a very big influence on readers,” said Knight.

Included in the study's examples were the Democratic-leaning Chicago Sun-Times picking George W Bush over Al Gore in 2000 and the Denver Post, which usually endorsed Republicans, choosing Gore. The effect in each case was a three-point flip by readers.

“They may not sound huge, but in a very close election a few percentage points can really swing the balance,” Knight said.

For papers in close battleground states, such as the Cincinnati Enquirer in Ohio or the Arizona Republic, marginal influence could matter a lot.

“Ohio is certainly a swing state and the election tends to go the way that Ohio votes,” said Knight. “I could imagine that even inducing a few per cent of their readers to switch positions could have a big influence on the overall electoral college.”