Columnist Peter Luke: Polling points to politics by TV commercial

If you missed Peter Luke’s column this weekend, you missed an insightful, albeit depressing take on the gubernatorial races in our midst.

Parsing the polls, Luke lays out some genuinely concerning observations. The polls are showing that the majority of candidates are barely known to the electorate. As a result, Luke argues, the state could expect to see a flood of television and radio commercials for the candidates come July 4, drowning out the commercial world for four weeks leading up to the Aug. 3 primary.

Now maybe folks who take the time to participate in such a process [Center for Michigan policy meetings] and express opinions on specific types of change aren’t representative of the slice of registered voters who cast ballots in an August primary. But maybe they are.

In that case, this content-free race for governor has offered, to date, little for them. The candidates say they want to “fix” Lansing and build a better economy without providing viable political strategies to do it or the means to pay for it.

And if polling finds, moreover, that none of the candidates has yet conveyed a personality that might lead voters to decide, on instinct absent specifics, that one or the other would make the best governor, what then?

Argue in the last few weeks with as much money that can be cobbled together for TV ads that the other guys are bums? And figure that the two candidates who can buy the most ads after July Fourth will face each other in November?

We’ve already seen robocalls in the race. And Rick Snyder the Ann Arbor businessman has been on television with a series of commercials touting his nerdiness, and the Hoekstra campaign has been the target of advertising, which has since been pulled off the air as untrue. If these the signs of things to come, the media buys of these campaigns are going to get interesting and fast.