According to Kim Kahn's Characteristics of Press Coverage in Senate and Gubernatorial Elections: Information Available to Voters: "The substance of political campaigns can be divided into three categories: issue coverage, horserace coverage, and coverage of personality traits. Each of these three topics is potentially important for voters as they develop overall evaluations of candidates for governor and senator." This article falls under horse race coverage because it's main focus is how much money has been spent promoting each campaign.
The beginning of the article revealed that interest groups including: Alliance for a Better Minnesota, Minnesota's Future, and MN Forward have become the most powerful players in political ads.
"The Alliance for a Better Minnesota, a liberal coalition, has saturated the airwaves with more than $1 million in post-primary ads that go after GOP candidate Tom Emmer. Business-backed Minnesota Future and MN Forward have each spent more than $300,000 on ads that either promote Emmer or take off on his DFL opponent, Mark Dayton. That's nearly $1.8 million in the last month.
By comparison, ad buys by the candidates have been relatively paltry -- just $430,000 among Emmer, Dayton and Independence Party candidate Tom Horner in the Twin Cities market."
The rest of the article focused mainly on campaign funding and very little on policies.
But voters want to know who is ahead in the race, and horse race articles like this allows the readers to follow the election standings. Kahn says there is an average of 67 paragraphs of horserace coverage during gubernatorial campaigns. This article alone has 23 paragraphs of horserace coverage.
For more coverage on the 2010 Governor's Election, visit http://www.startribune.com
or click here for the full article.
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