by P.D. Lesko

Since its inception, The A2Indy has never endorsed in any election. The newspaper has presented information about candidates, information about ballot proposals and urged its readers to inform themselves and then exercise their right to vote. Between 2011 and today, more newspapers have opted out of the endorsement business. After all, who is better qualified to decide whom and what to vote for, than voters? This community newspaper has given voters on all sides of issues and who support candidates on the left, right and in between, a forum to share their passionately held opinions, civilly. This election year, the newspaper has received a record number of letters to the editor and op-eds. Read them.

MLive.com doesn’t publish their readers’ opinions anymore, and when in print, and the newspaper did publish endorsements, those endorsements were, famously, right-leaning. This irritated Ann Arbor’s left-leaning residents. One man, in a 2009 letter to the editor published by that newspaper, attributed the Ann Arbor News’s “demise” as a print newspaper to its 2000 endorsement of George W. Bush. “When you endorsed G. W. Bush in 2000, I was surprised, but understood that the impulse to punish President Clinton for behaving like a normal, healthy adult male might have overwhelmed your good sense.”

One person’s opinion can include nuggets of wisdom right alongside what other people might interpret as nonsense. Welcome to what the U.S. Constitution granted, and what the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld for decades: protected speech.

Newspaper chains including Gannett, Alden Global’s MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing have all stopped publishing presidential endorsements, impacting dozens of papers. On the other hand, The Wall Street Journal hasn’t endorsed in a presidential race since 1928, when it backed Republican Herbert Hoover.

In 2024, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos, did not endorse a presidential candidate. Employees resigned. Hundreds of thousands of readers cancelled their subscriptions and Bezos was vilified. The Los Angeles Times also decided not to endorse in the 2024 presidential election. The L.A. Times was purchased in 2018 by NantCapital, a company owned by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a California venture capitalist. Newspapers are, increasingly, bowing out of the candidate endorsement game. The Ann Arbor Independent has never been in that game for the simple reason that the newspaper has confidence in its community of readers to educate themselves and to make up their own minds.

When the Minneapolis Star-Tribune chose not to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, the paper told its readers, “We are confident in the ability of informed citizens to decide whom they wish to vote for. We’re endorsing you!”

Precisely.

Voters in western Washtenaw County tend to be right-leaning. Solidly blue Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti are surrounded by smaller cities and Townships in which voters identify as Independents or Republicans.

This is a map of how Washtenaw County voted in the 2020 Presidential election:

In 2016, 57 of the country’s newspapers with the largest circulation endorsed Hilary Clinton. Donald Trump won Michigan by a narrow margin and the presidency, a shocker to pollsters (and millions of Democratic voters) nationwide. In 2016 Washtenaw County voters cast 188,578 ballots for president, with 68 percent voting for Clinton and 27 percent voting for Trump.

In 2010, when Ann Arbor Republican Rick Snyder ran for governor, he captured 48.3 percent of the County’s 117,858 votes cast. Democrat Virg Bernero captured 49.8 percent of the votes cast for governor. In total, 123,022 of the County’s total 269,037 registered voters participated in that election.

More people in Washtenaw County are registered voters, and more people are voting. That is the best endorsement for no endorsements there can be.