Stick around long enough in the media business during election season, and you’ll recognise the substance in the old, biblical saying that there’s “nothing new under the sun.”
Our elections repeat familiar themes: party
defections, propaganda (aka fake news), mysterious financial flows for
campaigning, criminal charges, unethical behaviour, race-baiting, bribery, grossly
over-inflated/unrealistic promises, and endless finger-pointing. The methods
may change, but the plot stays essentially the same.
Even party rebels have become entirely
predictable as an election story. Poll the generations and detect variances in
“wow” factors regarding the party “switcheroos” - a word launched in the local
lexicon by late T&T Guardian EIC, Carl Jacobs in the early 1990s - later
borrowed by me, and “corrected” to read “switchcross” by editors of a UWI publication
on the 1995 elections.
Still, none of this predictability makes
elections dull or unimportant. Despite strikingly similar party agendas and
shared reliance on state-driven solutions, electoral results should help shape
public opinion, influence policy directions, and sharpen national priorities.
Consider actions against the scourge of
violent crime, chronically (and in my view erroneously) focused on policing as
supreme anodyne. Can you tell the difference between the parties, apart from
the faces? GML’s Bavita Gopaulchan’s interrogation of some key players Monday together
with platform rhetoric have not identified fundamental differences, though there
is nothing to suggest an absence of genuine concern.
Also “economic diversification”- a fanciful
term that pops up every cycle but rarely leads to comprehensive follow up, with
every party hypnotically drawn back to energy revenues.
Heading into 2025, it all seems
predictable. The way political content is being generated and spread appears to
be a singular area of real change. Yesterday’s pamphleteers and propagandists
are today’s social media activists, armed with memes and AI. Paid social media
teams have long been assembled. The WhatsApp groups are teeming.
Meanwhile, much of the panic around
AI-generated content - deepfakes, fake audio, doctored videos - isn’t about
brand-new technology tailor-made for political deception. Even basic
manipulation, enabling forged signatures and edited clips, has been around for
ages.
The disgraceful Cambridge Analytica scandal
of 2010 wasn’t the first or last of its kind either, though it did help push
data privacy laws forward and brought current thinking on cybercrime more in
line with reality.
Still, generative AI can make deception
easier and more convincing. While AI isn’t the core problem, its misuse
highlights how far some will go to mislead. The real issue seems to be the
belief that dishonesty can win votes.
Cue the social scientists, now better known
for off-the-cuff/top-of-the-head media “comments” as substitutes for studied
research which, even so, needs to extend beyond the exclusive use of historical
data. We should better understand the perils of over-reliance on both methods
of explaining current realities.
But we can still look at some issues of
historical fact for initial guidance. People are buzzing about the number of
parties in this election - 17 in total. But that’s not a record. There were 19
in pandemic-stricken 2020. And back in 1976 and 1981, we had 11 and 12
respectively.
Voter turnout? Even the legendary 1986 33-3
landslide had a 65.45% turnout - still below the 88.11% peak of 1961. We’ve
hovered around 65% average for decades. Without a major, phenomenal, shakeup,
that’s unlikely to change.
But those with historical and contemporary interest
would be well-advised to seek out some demographic indicators that have been
largely absent in much of the current guesswork. I think there might be some
important differences in 2025.
The presence of international observer
missions is also more likely than not to confirm the professional conduct of
the Elections and Boundaries Commissions (EBC), ritualised claims against which
have never been proven outside of the predictable mauvais langue.
Ditto the importation of votes. I have
before pointed to the existence of migration data to disprove longstanding
mythical claims of 1961 malfeasance involving neighbouring island populations,
and today there is the same kind of ole talk surrounding Venezuelans.
As for leadership changes close to
elections? Not new. George Chambers became prime minister after Eric Williams’
death on March 29 and was appointed party leader after the fact, winning the elections
of November 9, 1981.
ANR Robinson was chosen to lead the NAR
months before the 1986 win. Kamla Persad-Bissessar won leadership of the UNC in
January and led the party to victory in May 2010. The first time Keith Rowley
entered an election as leader of the PNM was in the 2015 win.
In short, the drama might look different,
but the stories are mostly the same. Let’s challenge ourselves to recognise today’s
differences if there are any.