Ed Pilkington

[Commentary] The 2016 Presidential election took a heavy toll on the vast army of journalists assigned to cover it, grinding down shoe leather, fingertips, and nerve-endings in equal measure. But for one reporter, Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star, the race for the White House was singularly burdensome, turning him into a night owl. So what happened to all this solid work, why did it appear to go up in a puff of smoke on election night?

There is a separate and febrile debate over whether or not opinion polls were in part to blame for giving the impression that the White House was in the bag for Hillary Clinton, but many other theories are circulating. One prevalent idea is that the media did its job but the public “just did not care.”The New York Times political reporter Jonathan Martin offers an opposite conclusion: that the coverage did hit home with voters, as reflected in Donald Trump’s historically bad popularity ratings. To which it might be added that Hillary Clinton is still winning in the popular vote.

[Ed Pilkington is chief reporter of the Guardian in the US]