Why Horse Race

I'm one of those people who bangs his head against the wall at the press' extreme preference for horse-race political coverage rather than stories about the issues, so I feel extremely dumb for not having thought of this explanation before Andrew Gellman did: "My theory, at least for the general election, is that most of the voters have already decided who they're going to vote for--and even the ones who haven't decided are often more predictable than they realize." And of course on tap of that, the truest "swing" voters are precisely the ones least likely to be paying attention to political coverage in the media.