The governing begins Wednesday, but first … ‘the silly season’

Some lingering thoughts as Election Day approaches:

The weeks leading up to an election are often called “the silly season” for the antics that emerge as candidates and their supporters make last-minute attempts to draw attention to themselves — or perhaps more accurately, to the potential faults of their opponents.

It is dismaying to me that the latter practice, while common enough on the grander scale of state and national politics, often seems even more prevalent during local elections such as those we’re conducting now. One would hope that in races involving friends and neighbors, the impulse to demonize an election opponent would be less intense than higher-profile contests between ambitious contestants for higher office with fewer ties of community between them.

But such hopes are sorely tested when local elections come around. We at the newspaper are often a popular collection point for rumors and scandalous claims from emotional supporters, and sometimes even candidates themselves, who think that an ugly late-campaign “revelation” will sink an opponent’s chances and thereby uplift their own.

We hardly welcome the array of purposely timed “tips” we get at the end of an election cycle. We do check them out if they sound plausible or relevant to the office a person is seeking, but we of course do not report them when they prove otherwise, nor are we inclined to report them if they amount to mere character assassination or simple embarrassment.

We are especially sensitive to such cases in the final days of a campaign. By policy, beginning on the Saturday before a Tuesday election, we do not under almost any circumstance report sensational claims or “disclosures” that could affect an election before the target of claims can thoroughly respond. Likewise, we stop publishing all specifically candidate-oriented letters to the editor on the Friday before a Tuesday election to ensure that claims are not published that cannot be fairly challenged.

Among other issues we wrestle with both in local elections and more high-profile campaigns is advertising designed to look like we endorsed candidates we didn’t endorse. In many races, endorsement decisions are difficult because of the individual strengths of competing candidates, and often in such cases, we acknowledge qualities we like about candidates that we don’t endorse. Inevitably, and frustratingly, advertising by some of these candidates cherry picks such comments, and may even insert the Daily Herald logo, to make it appear that we supported them. In the most egregious cases, we will protest and demand that misleading advertising be stopped, though even that cannot eliminate messages that have already been mailed and delivered. If our endorsement is of value to you, be sure that the candidates appearing to have it explicitly state that they do.

Finally, it seems we always have candidates who dismiss our interest in reporting about them — until they see that their opponents have gotten coverage.

In one case during this campaign, a village president candidate steadfastly refused to answer a questionnaire or to be interviewed about his qualifications, saying he was not in the race for publicity. Yet, when he saw our endorsement for his opponent, he was quick to seek changes in our references to him.

In another, a candidate who apparently did not see our numerous pleas dating as far back as last December seeking candidate emails so we could contact them discovered more than a week after our endorsement of his opponents was published that our efforts to reach him for interviews and a questionnaire had failed. He contacted us and appealed for consideration. We complied as much as we could, but when a candidate is oblivious to our coverage of his race until he learns of it from a neighbor, it’s hard to generate a lot of sympathy.

So it goes. Six more days of “silly season” electioneering — and then the serious days of governing begin. I hope you realize that the latter is what’s really important as you analyze the coverage you see in the Daily Herald, other publications and your home mailbox.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His book “Conversations, community and the role of the local newspaper,” containing a topics-oriented selection from 25 years of this column, is available at eckhartzpress.com.