The Challenge of Tuesday

Over the years I've tried lots of strategies for anticipating the cartoon that will run in the paper the morning after Election Day.

For those of us still publishing editorial cartoons on dead trees, it's nearly impossible to say something worthwhile in the Wednesday morning newspaper on the day after an election. Last-minute press priorities go to the news pages, as they should, so opinion pages have to be filed earlier in the evening before the returns are complete. And even if results are conclusive early, which is rare, how is the lowly cartoonist to digest the dizzying list of winners and losers and comment graphically by deadline?

I began today on the drive into work by making a mental list of the most-to-least certain electoral results, trying to assess which race or races I might reasonably anticipate. At best, I'll go into Tuesday evening with a wad of sketches that I might work from as voters' choices begin to materialize.

In past years I've played it several ways. Sometimes I've chosen an entirely different issue for the cartoon's topic. This tends to make one look clueless, commenting on, say, global warming or the Bengals' season when everyone else wakes up wanting to talk about election results.

Other times I've drawn cartoons projecting opposite results. But that doesn't work, because usually the ed page editor has to make a choice before the election outcomes are certain, and consequently must opt for the third idea, the mealy-mouthed limp-wristed one that avoids making a call and comments on the need to clean up the yard signs or whatever. By Thursday, the cartoons in the bank feel stale and out of touch with the larger picture that has evolved.

And that's the unavoidable truth -- even if I were to call a certain predictable race in advance and have a cartoon ready to run, that cartoon usually has a hollow feel to it when it shows up in the post-election day newspaper. It hasn't had the benefit of context. Was this race part of a larger change in the political landscape? Or was it eclipsed by an unanticipated pattern in the results?

You can't write (or draw) journalism before it happens. The rolling nature of online journalism will change these ways cartoonists have had to think.