Comparison:
The campaign staff are like the guys with the brooms that are frantically sweeping the ice as this 44-pound rock slides along the ice. It’s a lot of activity no doubt but one questions how much is being accomplished. Maybe all that sweeping allows the stone to move another inch or two along the ice. Or maybe it makes the rock head down the ice just a little bit straighter than it might otherwise.
But this much is also true: Even if the effect is minimal, then your team will drill and drill and drill until the sweepers can get the stones into the best position possible.
Sarah Isgur Thompson writing for The Dispatch (in 2022!) notices a simile to grapple with the dynamics of national political campaigns. Curling sweepers (or in this comparison campaign planners and producers) have precious little influence over the path of the heavy stone launched toward its eventual goal/home. Frantic activity with minimal change seems the true focal point of Thompson's inspired comparison find.
Context:
But then it hit me like a blast from the hammer: Curling is the perfect analogy for political campaigns.
The underlying dynamics of an election cycle (the economy, the popularity of the president, national events driving the news cycle) are like the 44-pound ‘stone‘ hurtling toward the (please hold while I google what the, you know, bullseye thing is called) . . . ‘house.‘ Once the stone is moving, this thing is heavy and it’s got momentum that is out of the ‘skip’s‘ control.
The campaign staff are like the guys with the brooms that are frantically sweeping the ice as this 44-pound rock slides along the ice. It’s a lot of activity no doubt but one questions how much is being accomplished. Maybe all that sweeping allows the stone to move another inch or two along the ice. Or maybe it makes the rock head down the ice just a little bit straighter than it might otherwise.
But this much is also true: Even if the effect is minimal, then your team will drill and drill and drill until the sweepers can get the stones into the best position possible.
In politics, a lot of elections are won by 6 points and there’s nothing the losing (or winning) team’s sweepers could have done to change the outcome. But some races come down to just a couple points and you rarely know which ones are going to be which. That means every race tries to hire the best sweepers and every sweeper sweeps for her life.
Citation:
Isgur, Sarah. "Do Campaigns Matter?" The Dispatch, thedispatch.com, 10 Oct. 2022. Web.
(Image by Lee Aigue, base image courtesy of Wikipedia, Oct. 2024.)
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