( – promoted by undercovercalico)
As much as I love blogging, I often think about the danger that comes when we think about and craft political strategies based on assuming the level of information that we political junkies pay attention to.
Just as an example, I told the story here about my conversation during the whole FISA debate with a co-worker who is a Democrat. She had never heard anything about FISA, even though she tends to read the largest newspaper in the Twin Cities daily. So of course, she would never question her support of Obama because of that. And perhaps more importantly, she would never apply any pressure to Obama either in the campaign or once elected to do the right thing on that issue.
Just yesterday I got together with another one of my friends who is probably the best informed of anyone I know in RL. She had never heard about Obama’s disagreement with the Supreme Court decision against extending the death penalty to crimes where murder is not involved.
I haven’t even asked anyone if they’ve picked up Obama’s nuance about getting out of Iraq vs. getting “combat troops” out of Iraq. But I’d venture to say it would NOT be something that has broken through the consciousness of most voters.
We all know that this is the result of an interweaving of people’s lack of desire for the details about political questions and the media’s corporate agenda. But whatever the cause, I don’t think elections are based on the kind of information most of us discuss on the blogs.
So, how are they decided? I think BooMan summarized it as well as I have seen in a recent posting titled Making It No Contest. I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Its some of the best political analysis I’ve read in a long time. But here are some bits.
In American politics, symbols are more important than power structures for a simple reason. Power structures are hidden. Most people don’t know who they’re voting for when they cast their vote for some individual candidate. In their mind they are voting for a candidate, not for a faction. This is particularly true for the independent voter that does not identify with any particular faction…By independent voter I mean the people that are truly persuadable as supporters of one of the two major parties. It is these voters in a dozen and a half swing states that determine the outcomes of national elections…
But the rubber meets the road where independent voters make up their minds. Bush was more likable than Gore and Kerry. That was enough to keep the elections close. There are two ways to win a national election. If you win the argument outright, like Ronald Reagan did in 1980 and 1984, most of the country will vote for you. But if the argument ends in dispute, it goes to the judges. And the judges are independent voters in a dozen and a half states that don’t have large party biases in either direction…
What we are trying to do is to win the argument. If we can win the argument, almost every state in the union will vote for us. The selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential race opens up an opportunity for the Democrats to win the argument in every region of the country. McCain is hoping that she will hold her own and force the decision to the judges. He hopes she will help him turn out his base in a few red states and take them out of contention. But he also hopes she will win over independent voters in the dozen and a half swing states.
Provided that they haven’t lost the argument, those independent voters are unlikely to vote for or against McCain for rational reasons. Policy will not be decisive. Personality will be decisive. Trust will be decisive. Intangible qualities and current events will be as important as message. Sarah Palin is likeable. She’s nice. In some ways she is reassuringly normal. And she is a woman…an attractive woman.
That’s what McCain is betting on in this roll of the dice.
I think he’s absolutely right about “winning the argument” vs “personality” and I think he’s also right about the idea that McCain is rolling the dice on the later. The only thing I’d add is that winning the argument is more about creating a compelling meme than it is about the kind of details that bloggers pay attention to. That’s exactly why both candidates are trying to lay claim to the “change” meme – they’ve calculated that it wins the argument.
Those of us who see much more at stake than these simple meme’s have a couple of choices. We can embrace the fact that this is how elections are decided and try to win the argument of memes. Or we can fight the systems that keep people voting at that level of understanding and convince them that being more aware of the specifics is important.
What we can’t afford to do is to ignore the realities of elections as they are currently played out in this country.
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Thursday night, I was reflecting on how I felt at the end of the Dem convention in 2004. I was incredibly disappointed and angry. That’s because I saw the Dems buying into the fear meme and trying to outgun the Republicans in terms of their attachment to the military.
If you look at things in those terms, I felt much better about the memes that were established this time. Fear has not been totally obliterated as a driving force. But it was much less visible than last time.
… the media will not cover, because its a dirty little media secret …
… if they figure that the election really is in the bag, even if only by a handful of states, they will start covering the story of why the winner won and why the loser lost before election day … because any reporter likes to be one of the ones to be covering the big storyline before the others.
Locking down the perception of being likely to carry enough swing states to make it look very difficult for the race to shift is part and parcel of the “landslide” effect.
That is why getting a grass roots effort going in South Florida to tie McCain to Buchanan via Palin, who supported Buchanan in 2000, could yield far in excess to the amount of effort invested.
…puts the election in play in nearly every state, he’s as crazy as McCain.
The reality remains that many political beliefs are heritable. McCain could have picked the ghost of Charlemagne as his running mate, and still win millions of American voters.
there are people on the blogs baffled that McCain would pick someone that no one’s heard of before, as if that will greatly affect people’s perceptions of the Republican ticket.
Consider that most people hadn’t heard of Barack Obama before the presidential campaign, either. November’s a long time away, and one of the boons of McCain picking such a controversial choice is that she’s getting ’round-the-clock media coverage. Give it a couple of weeks, and the “who the heck is she?” argument won’t wash. Not many people knew anything about Clinton before he left Arkansas – which is hardly more of a power player than Alaska.
What’ll stick: mother of 5, including of a soldier, an infant, a son with Down Syndrome. Very conservative social policy. Young, energetic, and not at all from a wealthy background. Biden needs to trounce her on policy during the debates, but otherwise she seems a savvy choice for McCain to run with (provided her home state scandals don’t sink her).
I have to give this to John McCain: he just made the race interesting. I doubt it’ll help him, but he did make an inspired choice here.
that the police might knock down their doors. It’s happening in St Paul right now (see my link below). Civil liberties are an issue that doesn’t get enough attention.
http://silencedmajority.blogs….