Nottingham Blog Sways Election

Large increase measured in votes for local offices not covered by other media

 Some of the most heavily viewed articles on the Nottingham Blog are the voters guides. Typical articles get almost all of the views they are going to get within a couple of days of being published. The voters guides get lots of views right through the day of the election. The most recent voters guide got nearly a hundred views on the day of the election, and several hundred views on the few days leading up to the election. Ultimately it received 1.23k views - about twice the number of views that an article about an uncontroversial Board of Selectman meeting receives. The Nottingham Blog has 608 subscribers, with many more readers coming in from Facebook and other sources.

Do the Nottingham Blog’s voters guides affect the outcome of elections?

Unlike the opinion media, the Nottingham Blog does not endorse candidates. The voters guide aims to provide concise information about the candidates’ positions to make it as easy as possible for voters to decide which candidates they prefer. Further, the races the Nottingham Blog focuses on are those that almost never receive coverage from any other news outlet. Information for these articles comes primarily from data gathered by CitizensCount.org, when it is available. When it is not available, the Nottingham Blog sends written questions to candidates and publishes their answers verbatim. These sources are supplemented with the candidates’ own published statements and other applicable sources. 

The Nottingham Blog published its first voters guide in November 2022. If the voters guides are affecting the election results, one would expect to see more people voting in the races that only the Nottingham Blog covers. The 2024 general election represents the first time this hypothesis could be tested against the results of a similar prior election. 

Substantially fewer voters skipped voting on the down-ticket races covered only by the Nottingham Blog in 2024 than they did in 2020.

In the 2020 general election, Nottingham cast 3,542 ballots. In the 2024 election, 3,706 ballots were cast. Both of these elections were high turnout, with 2024 possibly being slightly higher.

In 2020, Nottingham voted for 4 seats for State Representative. It was possible for there to have been 14,168 votes cast; however, there were only 12,284 votes  - a shortage of 1,884 votes, 13.3% less than what was possible.

In 2024, Nottingham voted for 3 seats for State Representative.  It was possible for there to have been 11,118 votes cast; however, there were only 10,200 votes - a shortage of 918 votes, 8.3% less than what was possible. 

The same effect can be observed in the State Senate race.

In 2020, Nottingham cast 3,331 votes for a State Senator - a shortage of 211 votes, 6.0% less than what was possible.

In 2024, Nottingham cast 3,557 votes for a State Senator - a shortage of 149 votes, 4.0% less than what was possible.

Of course, this doesn’t prove that the increase in voter participation came from the Nottingham Blog. For some up-ticket races, undervoting was a bit lower in 2024 than in 2020. Perhaps the voters were more strongly opinionated this year. Perhaps this year some voters who would otherwise be undecided had stronger opinions about the political parties. Perhaps campaigning efforts were more effective this year. But those factors don’t seem much different between 2020 and 2024. That a huge portion of the voters are now reading the Nottingham Blog’s voters guide seems to be the big difference for the down-ticket races.

Invisible in these data is whether persuadable voters changed who they were going to vote for based on easier access to information about the candidates. If people who were otherwise not going to vote got access to information that allowed them to decide on who to vote for, it seems likely that persuadable voters would be similarly influenced.

As some readers know, this blog is dedicated to the memory of my step-father, Thomas D. Miller, who was an investigative journalist for a newspaper in a small city in West Virginia. That newspaper is still in business, but it’s a shadow of what it once was. 

The internet produced an extinction event for commercial local journalism. This has harmed our society. Local journalism has a crucial role in informing voters. 

The loss is measurable. Here’s the proof.