It Is Now, Finally, Acceptable to Call The Campaign a ‘Sprint’

I am making a ruling: Because we are inside of two weeks until Election Day, it is now allowable for news outlets to call the remaining campaign a “sprint.”

Before that two-week mark, calling it a sprint presented a clear misunderstanding of what “sprinting” actually means, or, alternatively, of the concept of time and its passage. And yet: On September 10, a New York Times election update headline read, “The debate will catapult the campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris into the two-month sprint to November.” Two months! If only one could run full bore, heedless of pacing or the need to recover one’s strength, for so long. But one cannot.

Or go back even further, to August 23: “With the conventions over, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are beginning the sprint to November.” At that point there were 74 days until the election.

(Yes, early voting is a thing, and is important. All of these stories, however, focus on “November” or other euphemism for Election Day itself; early voting does not alter this discussion.)

The problem, at least with these two examples, is that the Times seemed to think that around the corner from every notable campaign event — a debate, a convention — lay a clear straightaway, the home stretch at Churchill Downs, instead of the twists and turns and hills through Boston’s suburbs on the way to Boylston Street. It betrays a certain lack of object permanence that often defines campaign coverage; “a big thing just happened, that is all there is or will ever be.”

And to be clear, this is not just the Paper of Record.

• An Axios story, 71 days before the election: “Harris ramps up strategy for sprint to the election.”
• An NBC News story, 36 days before the election: “Trump ramps up his pace of campaigning in the sprint to Election Day.” (There is lots of “ramping” going on in these sprints, again calling into question whether these headline writers and reporters know what any of these words mean.)
• A CNBC story, 30 days before the election: “Harris floods the zone with Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert, podcast interviews in final election sprint.”
• A Fox affiliate, the AP, NPR; it was everywhere!

(We should note: the Times also called this “a Grueling Race to the Finish” on October 5; stopped clocks and such, I suppose.)

Thankfully, these continued offenders have now entered the appropriate window for the word’s use. And use it they will — already this week we have an AP story on “the campaign’s final sprint,” an ABC affiliate’s piece on the “final sprint before the election,” CNN’s pregnancy-like guide on “what to expect in the sprint to Election Day.” There will be dozens more of these, only now managing to avoid violating basic tenets of language and temporality. We grow weary of sprinting; soon, enough.