Television debates hardly influence voters’ voting behavior, a study by Harvard Business School. Glad someone else says it out loud, because it never happens to me that I change my mind because of such a debate. The moment just before I enter a voting booth, that is always a tricky moment when everything is suddenly open again and I can suddenly agree with the last person I speak to. Do I still see myself making a different box red than planned. But debates on TV, they don’t bother me.
Yes, three times BBB leader Caroline van der Plas in three talk shows in one evening, like Tuesday, that does something to you. No debate, just one woman with one message. She joined Khalid&Sophie, Show news and with VI. You could see she was dead tired, but she didn’t relax. She was given and took all the space to announce whatever Johan Derksen thinks, and René van der Gijp fished the floats into her home by saying that it didn’t matter what she or the BBB thought, a vote for her was, according to him the perfect protest voice. Against The Hague, against everything. I wonder how many of the nearly one million VIviewers who follow voting advice.
To Caroline van der Plas News hour on Wednesday evening certainly not a million people will have watched, in terms of influence it will also run wild, I think, because this was another debate (with Mirjam Bikker, party leader of the ChristenUnie) and it was about the ‘content’. The well-known song of nitrogen, migration and the distribution law for asylum seekers. National themes that are lamenting on television are discussed in debates with national leaders of national parties. What’s in it for me when I’m in my cubicle later? Do I now know who those provincial administrators are or what those water boards want with the water? Why do I have to learn from an online voting guide that pro-nature people want high water and pro-farmer voters low?
minutes long raid against Mark Rutte
In Toothache last Sunday, Rutger Castricum, captain of ‘team right’, said that ‘The Hague’ failed to tell the voters what the Provincial Council elections are actually about. “We are here doing their job.” Only Toothache and its own program The court cart talk to voters. So did he. But to be fair, he’s not completely wrong. Toothache is of course mainly a quiz, with a right-wing team competing against a left-wing team, and in which presenter Diederik Ebbinge occasionally bursts into a minute-long raid against Mark Rutte. But there were also pieces of information between the game rounds. I’ve seen a Member of Parliament pass by, even a dike warden, and I now know that you call such a person water count if there are no dikes in that water board.
Wednesday was episode 6 of The court cart. This time Rutger Castricum picked up Ines Kostic, Member of Parliament for the Party for the Animals (PvdD), in his Volkswagen van, and together they drove to the provincial house of Haarlem. Kostic told how the two cats she took from the shelter with her friend opened her eyes. “You get to know their characters, their needs and what they like. You pamper them.” All animals deserve that treatment, she believes.
Castricum showed her a video of a duck slaughterhouse on fire, presumably set on fire by animal activists. Her supporters, he suggests. Then also a video in which a construction project is halted because a natterjack toad lives on the site. “Your people too,” he posited. To which Kostic said she found it reassuring that you don’t have to be big to change something. All critters help, so to speak. The same goes for election TV. Little bits of knowledge help the watching voter.