Employing quite a bit of Alice Through the Looking Glass reasoning the newspaper's endorsement of the ersatz Republican challenger to Commissioner Rowland will have the same effect that all newspaper endorsements have on political candidacy.
Zero or the opposite.
Most people prefer to make up their own minds about who they're going to vote for and that's probably the best way to do it anyway.
Whichever side gets the endorsement usually makes the mistake of trying to flaunt it, which energizes the others supporters and irritates a certain amount of people who don't like being told what to do or who to like.
There is a secondary question of making endorsements in primaries which I on principle think make them even less valuable.
This is because a primary is a situation where a party is picking its best representative to put forth its views. This purpose does not seem to be congruent with what any newspaper would be trying to do since they purport to be non-biased in their approach to political parties.
We know that's not true of course, but it does make one long for the old days when newspapers were Democrat or Republican and wore it proudly on their sleeve. The readers knew that the paper was going to endorse and carry water for whichever candidate whose party they supported no matter what they did or said.
This page's prediction is that the non-endorsement of Rowland will have the same dramatic effect of the Dana Barker endorsement on the Josh Penry race in 2006.
Janet Rowland should be grateful for the expected boost.
