The year was 1916, the First World War raged, Woodrow Wilson was in a desperate three-way race for reelection, and sharks were about to experience a shift in public perception that would endure into the next millennium.
Prior to 1916, sharks weren’t regarded as particularly dangerous in the United States. A 1915 letter in the New York Times claimed that there were no verifiable cases of a shark killing a human being and even presented a $500 bounty–the equivalent of almost $15,000 today–for any proof that such an event had happened. That bounty had gone unclaimed for 20 years. The American general public just weren’t all that concerned with sharks.
Then came the summer of the shark. In July, a man was killed by a shark in Beach Haven, New Jersey (in keeping with the general apathy towards sharks, the earliest headlines simply reported “Man killed by fish”). Five days later, a man in Spring Lake, New Jersey was bitten and died from his wounds. A week later, upstream in Matawan Creek, a 12-year-old boy vanished beneath the water. His friends claimed they saw a shark. A recovery swimmer was bitten while searching for the child and died on his way to the hospital. The missing child was never found but, later that same day, another boy was bitten in the same area. He survived.
Four deaths and one near miss, in the span of two weeks in the New Jersey summer, was enough to trigger the first summer of the shark. Beaches were on high alert. Vacationers went inland. Hotels sat empty. The illusion was shattered. Sharks weren’t just fish. Sharks were maneaters.
My co-blogger often points to Jaws as the turning point for the public perception of sharks and I certainly can’t argue that Jaws instilled a generational fear of shark attacks. But I would argue that Jaws would not have worked without the groundwork laid in the Summer of 1916. The decades that followed saw a growing avarice towards these grinning gristle fish. Even Jacques Cousteau, before he became the legendary defender of ocean life, prominently featured both the danger of sharks and his crew’s disproportionately violent response to their presence in his earliest documentaries. The fear was already there, just beneath the surface.
This is not an article about shark attacks. This is an article about US Elections.
Elections, like Democracy itself, are a conflagration of lofty ideals forced to contend with the disjointed and irrational mess that we call the Real World. Political scientists invest a tremendous amount of effort into answering one fundamental question: are voters rational, and if so, how? Retrospective voting is one theory that posits voters cast their votes to punish or reward political leaders for their performance. It’s a nice, clean theory that doesn’t require voters to be fully fluent in policy, but rather vote relative to changes in their own welfare as a result of the incumbent’s leadership.
It’s a tidy little theory that is almost certainly completely wrong. Vox did a very thorough write-up a couple of years back: Did shark attacks eat into Woodrow Wilson’s votes in 1916?
Enter the concept of blind retrospection, where voters punish or reward political leaders based on events that are completely out of their control, but maybe happen close to election time, or in a way that ties the event to a candidate. Like, for example, shark encounters.
In Blind Retrospection: Why Shark Attacks Are Bad For Democracy the authors investigate the election of 1916 and how the summer of the shark impacted Woodrow Wilson’s reelection campaign. Wilson won that election, but he did much worse than in 1912. Wilson also lost his home state, New Jersey, where he had served as Governor. He lost New Jersey by a lot. The magnitude of his home state defeat wouldn’t be surpassed until Donald Trump, a century later, lost New York by more than double Wilson’s margin.
The sharks became a metaphor:
“Newspaper cartoons now portrayed Wilson’s chances for reelection in November, using the shark fin as the symbol for his potential loss. The black fin labeled “defeat” was shown slicing through shark-infested northeast regions. Other political cartoons of the day showed lawyers, represented by sharks heading toward a beleaguered sailboat, embossed with “Union Bank.” At the stern of the bank boat, a chewed and legless victim dangled over the gunnel depicting “deposits.””
Blind Retrospection: Why Shark Attacks Are Bad For Democracy
Wilson mounted a federal response, but by then, the attacks were long passed and the damage had been done. The authors of Blind Retrospection conclude that “every indication in the New Jersey vote returns is that the horrifying shark attacks during the summer of 1916 reduced Wilson’s vote in the beach communities by about ten percentage points.” The voter is not rational.
“In the case of the shark attacks, retrospection was surely blind. Shark attacks are random events in the purest sense of the term, and they have no governmental solution. If bathers insist on swimming in the ocean, governments then and now cannot save them.”
That wasn’t the whole story, though. In a series of back-and forth papers and replies that stretched over 20 years, the original authors and their critics eventually circled around a consensus assessment that, while the New Jersey Shark Attacks of 1916 likely had some effect on Woodrow Wilson losing New Jersey, shark attacks in general do not affect elections.
That’s a relief.
Or maybe it isn’t. There’s a lot to work through in the dense back and forth between very serious scholars arguing whether or not shark bite incidents influence elections, but a one observation stuck out to me:
The pace of policy implementation and impact is far slower than the pace of American elections. If voters are voting retrospectively to punish political leaders for how policies affected their welfare, they don’t really have enough time to make a real evaluation. The retrospect is, if not blind, then very noisy: “results suggest that voters may struggle to truly hold government coalitions accountable, as objective performance metrics appear to be largely out of the immediate control of political coalitions.”
What does any of this mean for 2024? We’re in an unprecedented situation where information and misinformation are far more easily dispersed than at any point in history. We are simultaneously among the most educated electorate and the most vulnerable to misinformation and propaganda. We have created an information ecosystem built on influence, where traditional gatekeepers of knowledge no longer hold sway over the dissemination of information, with all the positives and negatives that entails. The information is abundant, but utterly uncurrated.
2024 was an election driven by vibes (in which, somehow, shark attacks played a supporting roll). I tend to agree with Jamelle Bouie’s assessment that the overarching explanation for Trump’s success was the global frustration with incumbent leaders who brought the world out of the pandemic to mixed results. Its effect will be felt for generations. Across the world, it’s been a largely no-win scenario for incumbents, regardless of political affiliation or accomplishment. President Biden had one of the most effective and consequential single terms in presidential history, and yet the general perception is that he failed. Without equivocation, the Inflation Reduction Law is the single most important piece of climate change legislation in history. That combined with Trump’s particular charisma and a late-election partnership with Elon Musk led to a narrow but definitive electoral win. At the same time, he underperformed in the House and Senate in a way that will lead to at least two years of what will likely be intractable chaos.
The final days of the 2024 election were dominated by outrage over the death of a rabid squirrel. The vibes were all over the place. Perhaps the Harris Campaign should have taken us up on the offer to go shark tagging with David Shiffman.
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