Sometimes a term becomes so much part of political conversation that it turns into cliché. That’s what’s happened with game change, or its variant game changer. It’s an event in a campaign or legislative battle portrayed as so momentous that it has the potential to alter the outcome. Its importance was evident in the best-selling book Game Change, which depicted the backstage drama of the 2008 presidential campaign and was turned into an HBO movie.
Ironically, the new employer of the Game Change (and 2012 campaign sequel Double Down) authors – Mark Halperin and John Heilemann – has had enough of the phrase. Washington Post media columnist Eric Wemple reported in late June 2014 that Bloomberg – which hired the pair to create a new politics site and anchor a television show – had banned the term from the news organization’s stories.
Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler “sends weekly notes to staff and commonly opines on matters of style and copy tightness. In last week’s version, Winkler suggested ejecting ‘game changer’ from the game: ‘avoid this trite term that trivializes the subject,’ wrote Winkler in the memo.”
His logic is sound. Wemple observed this about The Washington Post’s own use of the term. “Prior to the book’s publication in January 2010, there were 198 references to ‘game changer’ in The Post, according to Nexis; in the four-plus years since, there have been 916. Corresponding numbers for the New York Times are 214 ‘game changer’s prior to Game Change and 821 ‘game changer’s after.”
Those numbers back-up anecdotal observations about the phrase having become a heavy favorite of political operatives, journalists, and pundits. Stuart Rothenberg, among Washington’s most esteemed analysts, wrote in May 2013, “Forget background checks and gun control, divisions within the GOP on immigration, and Republican intransigence on negotiating a budget deal with the president. The current triple play of Benghazi, the IRS and now the Justice Department’s seizure of journalists’ phone records has the potential to be a political game changer for 2014.”
But its increasingly common usage irks academics looking for less simplistic and less dramatic explanations of how elections are decided. “I think ‘game change’ is typically used tautologically – ‘What does (losing candidate) need at this point? He needs a game changer; it’s basically, he needs something that will cause him to win,’” said Bethany Albertson, a University of Texas–Austin political scientist who studies political attitudes and persuasion.
“When it’s used to label events, it’s used very freely, generally with no empirical basis. . . . I guess pundits are incentivized to use the language because it makes whatever happened sound hugely important, but there’s no check on its use.”
The 2013 book The Gamble by George Washington University’s John Sides and UCLA’s Lynn Vavreck took a similarly critical stance: “The search for ‘game-changers’ may make for grabby headlines, but it does not really help us understand presidential elections in general and the 2012 presidential election in particular.”
The pair crunched numbers to argue that more basic factors, such as the uptick of the ailing economy’s recovery, played a far more crucial role in determining the election’s outcome.
Sometimes events do live up to their hype as game changers.
Often, it’s a debate. Even more than a half century later, a fresh viewing of the 1960 debates shows Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts a superior performer to his Republican rival, Vice President Richard Nixon. And while Nixon certainly held his own, speaking fluidly and fluently about a range of public policy issues, Kennedy’s cool performance and telegenic appearance, helped seal many voters’ decisions. And then there was Texas governor Rick Perry’s gaffe at a 2012 primary debate in which he couldn’t remember the three cabinet agencies he wanted to abolish.