I’ve been read­ing a lot of polit­i­cal cov­er­age this pri­mary season—too much for my or anyone’s health and sanity. And in the course of that read­ing I’ve devel­oped a number of pet peeves about polit­i­cal report­ing. Many of these, I real­ize, are common and long-​standing com­plaints: from the echo-​chamber aspect of it all to the too-​predictable cycle that car­ries “news” from a cam­paign con­fer­ence call on Day 0 to sites like TPM and Politico on Day 1 to arti­cles in the news­pa­pers and in Slate on Day 2.

But one major com­plaint that I haven’t seen aired before is that both the cam­paigns and the news media appear to share an assump­tion that seems to me mostly unwar­ranted. The assump­tion is that the deci­sion to vote for a can­di­date is the sum total of lots of smaller deci­sions: what that voter thinks about issues a, b, and c; how that voter feels about the race, reli­gion, and gender of can­di­dates m, n, and p; and which can­di­date the voter thinks will be better suited to handle sit­u­a­tions x, y, and z. The idea is that if you can find the right math­e­mat­i­cal weight to assign to each of these micro-​decisions, you will be able to pre­dict to a high degree of accu­racy the macro-​decision of who a voter will chose in the polling booth. Con­trari­wise, if you want to explain why a voter chose the can­di­date she did, you should be able to break it back down into lots of little micro-​decisions.

My prob­lem with this assump­tion is that it doesn’t at all take into account the fact that at a cer­tain point most voters make a deci­sion to sup­port their can­di­date, and from that point for­ward that macro-​decision will deter­mine in large part how they make their micro-​decisions. In other words, once you pick your guy or gal, you start to adjust your think­ing along the lines that are most friendly to that guy or gal. (You want them to win, after all.)

The most vivid exam­ple of this is the exit poll that showed that Hillary Clin­ton won 95% of the voters in Wis­con­sin who said that expe­ri­ence was the most impor­tant qual­ity in a Demo­c­ra­tic can­di­date. But the way this fact is always reported makes it sound like people were look­ing for some­one with expe­ri­ence first, and only then chose Clin­ton. But the arrow of cau­sa­tion here seems con­fused at best. There’s no good reason not to think that the reverse was true: that people picked Clin­ton and then, when asked to jus­tify that choice, said that “experience” was the most impor­tant qual­ity in a can­di­date. And no one has to guess why they would choose that qual­ity: the “experience” line is, after all, the one that the Clin­ton cam­paign has been feed­ing its sup­port­ers since the beginning.

I noticed this assump­tion at work again today in a post by Greg Sar­gent at TPM’s Horse’s Mouth. Sar­gent quotes a new poll by the New York Times that says 48% of Democ­rats think that the press goes harder on Clin­ton than it does on Obama. Even after acknowl­edg­ing that 51% of Democ­rats think that the press is either neu­tral or biased for Hillary, Sar­gent calls it “eye-opening that nearly half of Dems say the media’s been harder on Hillary—it’s a far larger pro­por­tion than among the pun­dits, who rarely if ever acknowl­edge this to be the case.”

Here again, though, it seems to me that Sar­gent is putting the cart before the horse. He’s assum­ing that people are making an inde­pen­dent judg­ment about media bias that has noth­ing to do with their choice of can­di­date. But isn’t it at least a little sus­pi­cious that that 48% number is so close to the level of sup­port for Clin­ton in national polls? If I were a Clin­ton sup­porter right now and some­one asked me if she was being fairly treated by the press, I would say “no.” But I don’t trust that my rea­sons for that judg­ment would be inde­pen­dent of my sup­port for her. A much more plau­si­ble sce­nario is that I would have decided at some point to sup­port Clin­ton and would now be faced with the fact that Clin­ton is not doing well in the pri­maries or in the polls. Given that I would want a way to explain that, and that I would want some way that doesn’t involve accept­ing the mes­sianic trans­fig­u­ra­tion of Barack Obama, why wouldn’t I accept the Clin­ton campaign’s media-​bias sto­ry­line, espe­cially when it’s fed to me from a NYT-hired pollster?

The point I’m trying to make here—somewhat con­vo­lut­edly, I acknowledge—is that this assump­tion I’m attack­ing involves unwar­ranted ideas about the causes of our deci­sions. Polit­i­cal reporters almost always talk about a voter’s choice to sup­port a can­di­date as if it were the final effect of a long and com­plex series of moti­va­tions and judg­ments. This is surely true for as long as a person remains unde­cided. But once a person makes a deci­sion to sup­port a can­di­date (even if that comes long before they visit the polling booth) that effect then itself becomes a cause of our moti­va­tions and judg­ments. I might vote for Clin­ton because she has the most expe­ri­ence, or I might think expe­ri­ence is the most impor­tant qual­ity in a can­di­date because I’ve decided to vote for Clin­ton. But polit­i­cal reporters almost never acknowl­edge this back-and-forth. I wish they would.