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A Brief Literary History of the Newspaper Endorsement

When did endorsements become pro forma, anyway? And what do they even do?

In the United States, newspaper presidential endorsements date back to 1860. That year, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and several then-major but now-defunct other papers supported Abraham Lincoln for president.

The Tribune’s support was particularly rabid—despite pro-slavery inklings on the masthead. Their ombudsman saddled Lincoln with a modifier that would follow him all his legacy, saying a vote for Abe was a vote for “an honesty that has never been impeached and patriotism that never despairs.”

In the interim 170 years, the Tribune endorsed many other candidates, though often with less rapturous language. They also continued to lean right. In 2008, they endorsed their very first Democratic presidential candidate: local hero Barack Obama.


The Los Angeles Times followed a similar trajectory. That paper was also “unwavering in backing Republican nominees for president” from its inaugural year in 1881 all the way to Nixon’s reelection in 1972. In a shrewd explainer, the journalist Sewell Chan presciently observed that the earliest endorsements “tended to offer little policy analysis and instead focused on the candidates’ personal character, or lack of it.”

Analyzing this trend, Chan implied a bias traceable to the paper’s conservative owners—aka, the Otis-Chandler dynasty, who held the Times until 2000.

There was a mid-century shake-up after the paper got egg on its face, following a petition to reelect Nixon just months after the Watergate scandal. In the 1980s, the Times began to skew moderate, in keeping with a blue-bleeding California. For decades, the paper refrained from making outright endorsements. But in 2008, the Times publisher ended “a 36-year hiatus” tossing the coin for—you guessed it—Barack Obama.


The New York Times followed its winning Lincoln bet with successive support for Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, and Grover Cleveland. In 1896 they broke a soothsaying streak by endorsing John H. Palmer, a Democrat who lost to William McKinley, and after that these East Coast editors became…unpredictable.

In 1928, a pro-tippling board endorsed Alfred E. Smith on the strength of a single issue: Prohibition. (“If he is defeated every fortress will be in the hands of the Drys,” the ombudsman wrote, dramatically. A sharp contrast, this reporter notes, to the recent onslaught of pro-tee-totaling coverage at the paper of record.)

The Times supported FDR for three of his four terms. Then another lost cause streak commenced, in close cahoots with the last Republican endorsement the paper would ever issue (Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1956). In succession, the paper went to bat for Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis.