Describing politics as a horse race is as common as dirt, but it’s time to turf it. Racehorses are majestic and noble creatures. Too many politicians and their handlers, in contrast, are the stuff of barn floors. You’ll never catch a thoroughbred padding its expense account during its trip to the paddock.
The media is too often accused of treating politics as if it is a horse race, i.e., being concerned only with who’s leading and who’s going to win.
Such an accusation can only be made by someone who has never gone to a racetrack, nor given a moment’s thought to the possibility that politics could be vastly improved if indeed it were run like a horse race.
Consider this: horse racing is the only sport in which spectators actively participate. When you go see a hockey game, you sit and watch. When you go to a football game, you sit and watch. When you go to a baseball game, you fall asleep.
Get in the game
But at the races, you buy a program, study the stats of the horses in the nine or 10 races on that day’s card and predict which horses will win (or place, or show, for the more timid).
This aspect has, admittedly, given “the sport of kings” its somewhat tawdry reputation. Betting has been a part of horse racing since long before little Stephen Harper saddled up for his first merry-go-round ride. Many horse racing fans prefer to use the polite expression “playing the ponies.”
When you wager, you always have a chance to win. There is no such thing as a sure thing in a horse race. When the starting gate is loaded, those thoroughbreds are all equal. The 50-1 nag doesn’t know that so few spectators have bet on it to win that it is deemed a long shot that probably couldn’t beat one of the goats commonly put in stables to keep the horses company.
But long shots can, and do, win. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen a 2-1 favourite straggle across the finish line in last place, I could fly to Louisville and put $100 on the nose of a pony in the next Kentucky Derby.
As a guy in a pari-mutuel lineup at Stampede Park once said, “I knew that horse wasn’t going to win its third race in a row, because his name isn’t Secretariat.”
Compare that with politics. In elections, long shots almost never win. In most campaigns, the winner is highly predictable. Most often, the only real drama derives from guessing how large the winner’s margin of victory will be.
If long shots had any chance at all in a democracy, there would be a lot more independent candidates running for office. But with the party system, the fix is in.
Picking winners
There is a concept in horse racing called “the wisdom of the crowd.” Studies over the years have statistically proven that a wagering crowd can correctly predict — i.e., bet on — the winner of one-third of a typical day’s races. This is an amazing collective feat. Any individual who can do that would regularly leave the track with a pocketful of cash.
In politics, there is no correlating notion of “the wisdom of the electorate.” There’s, “The voters are never wrong,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean they selected winners. Astute observers of politics will admit that if one-third of candidates elected were high-quality winners, the Canadian public would have improved its performance to the level of pony players.
For instance, apparently there are few, if any, horse racing fans in Mount Pearl. The proof? Steve Kent.
Politics, a horse race? It should be so honourable.
Brian Jones is a 4-1 copy editor at The Telegram. He can be reached at [email protected].