Undecided
This Chris Hayes report of the mind of the undecided voter (via Peter Suderman’s bloggingheads with Ezra Klein) is amazing to me. Voter irrationality I understand, even when it infuriates me, and voter ignorance is frequently a given, but the completely apolitical thinking of undecided voters just baffles me.
Here’s Hayes:
These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn’t the word “issue”; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the “political.” The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief—not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.
To the extent that many voters are like these undecided voters, this could explain many things. It could help to explain why largely issue-driven protest candidacies always fail: the people to whom the protest candidate (i.e., the embodiment of the anti-establishment, the opponent of the failed system, etc.) should be the most attractive are the very kinds of people who don’t even think in terms of “issues.” When someone like Ron Paul runs an entirely policy-driven, sometimes obscure policy-driven, campaign he does not reach these people, to whom foreign policy is truly and completely foreign. It helps explain how McCain succeeds with voters, while those informed on and actually concerned about his policy views rule him out as unacceptable. He talks about himself as he does in this ad and bases his candidacy on his biography.
This reminds of some of the basic insights of Applebee’s America, according to which, “People are desperate to connect with one another and be part of a cause greater than themselves.” That last part of the sentence is virtually McCain’s campaign slogan. He talks about a “cause greater than ourselves” all the time, and evidently people love it. If voters crave authenticity, it does make you wonder what Michiganders were doing electing Mitt Romney, but nationally it seems to be the case that many voters are responding to McCain and Huckabee with the baffling irrationality of the undecided voter’s mentality.
Cross-posted at Eunomia
Political bloggers would do well to remember that we live in a country where three times as many people can name two of Snow White’s dwarfs as can name two Supreme Court Justices. See http://aolmedia.tekgroup.com/article_print.cfm?article_id=1029
— Stuart Buck · Jan 17, 03:52 PM · #
Bizarrely, ‘the political’ isn’t actually a noun, but a verb. Things, like grievances, aren’t political vs. non-political; they’re things that we apply the act of politics to, or don’t. The trouble is that Americans are shaking out into three main groups: (1) politicians and their minions, (2) apolitical undecideds, and (3) activist politicizers. In all three groups massive misunderstandings about the appropriateness of political behavior are flourishing.
Though people in group (3) have been steadily transforming cultural rules, norms, beliefs, and institutions into self-conscious power struggles, it’s not quite right to see the problem with group (3) as confusing what’s political with what isn’t. I’m afraid there simply is no standard internal to politics by which to judge such things. The real problem is that group (3) has ‘politicized’ things that used to be apolitical by elevating them to political adjudication and administration at the national level, where sure enough group (1) is more than happy to receive them. Nationalizing ‘gay rights’ or ‘the right to life’ benefits both sides of both group (1) and (3) — not precisely because doing so ‘politicizes the issue’ but because it transforms the exercise of politics into a pitched battle at the highest levels of power. With the stakes raised so high, the relevance of groups (1) and (3) skyrockets: they transfix our attention; what they say and do takes on importance; what they say and do takes on market value.
Except perhaps for poor group (2), which is full of people too busy trying to get through daily life. They’re either working too hard, slacking too hard, or both to notice and comprehend what’s going on. Nationally politicized issues appear in their favorite sitcoms and flicker through their newspapers, but that’s about it. If they don’t understand why some things have been nationalized as political issues and some haven’t, they understand even less why some things should be nationalized and some not — a question that can be addressed from within politics on the basis of how best to actualize the doing of politics within our particular federal republican democracy. Indeed, even many politics buffs are likely to grow uncomfortable if asked why their favorite issues ought to be adjudicated and administered at the national level. Group (2), when jolted into political awareness every two or four years, thinks that politics means forming an opinion about which national cause being peddled is ‘for them’ (literally and figuratively), voting for the person doing the peddling, and then going back into the citizenship equivalent of suspended animation.
We are in great danger of defaulting by habit to the idea that ‘politics’ means fighting at the national level for the power to decide the exception for the entire US. This is a sickly and impoverished concept of ‘the political’ as a verb. Unfortunately I expect to see it deepen and strengthen over time.
— James · Jan 17, 04:02 PM · #