interesting article about dumb Bush voters -- according to St. Thomas stupidity is invincible

[Michael Eisenstadt]

LESSONS LEARNED ABOUT UNDECIDED VOTERS.

Decision Makers by Christopher Hayes (c) The New Republic

For those who follow politics, there are few things more mysterious, more
inscrutable, more maddening than the mind of the undecided voter. In this
year's election, when the choice was so stark and the differences between
the candidates were so obvious, how could any halfway intelligent human
remain undecided for long? "These people," Jonah Goldberg once wrote of
undecided voters, on a rare occasion when he probably spoke for the entire
political class, "can't make up their minds, in all likelihood, because
either they don't care or they don't know anything." And that was more or
less how I felt before I decided to spend the last seven weeks of the
campaign talking to swing voters in Wisconsin. In September, I signed up to
work for the League of Conservation Voters' Environmental Victory Project--a
canvassing operation that recruited volunteers in five states to knock on
doors in "swing wards" with high concentrations of undecided or persuadable
voters. During my time in suburban Dane County, which surrounds Madison, I
knocked on more than 1,000 doors and talked to hundreds of Wisconsin
residents. Our mission was simple: to identify undecided voters and convince
them to vote for John Kerry. My seven weeks in Wisconsin left me with a
number of observations (all of them highly anecdotal, to be sure) about
swing voters, which I explain below. But those small observations add up to
one overarching contention: that the caricature of undecided voters favored
by liberals and conservatives alike doesn't do justice to the complexity,
indeed the oddity, of undecided voters themselves. None of this is to say
that undecided voters are completely undeserving of the derision that the
political class has heaped on them--just that Jonah Goldberg, and the rest
of us, may well be deriding them for the wrong reasons. Undecided voters
aren't as rational as you think. Members of the political class may
disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic
rationality. We're giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me
they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the
environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought
that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally
be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a
voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting
Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man's house,
she still couldn't make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who
called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she
had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why?
Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet
as we all  stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow
organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the
facts on her side, the organizer didn't have much luck. Undecided voters do
care about politics; they just don't enjoy politics. Political junkies tend
to assume that undecided voters are undecided because they don't care enough
to make up their minds. But while I found that most undecided voters are, as
one Kerry aide put it to The New York Times, "relatively low-information,
relatively disengaged," the lack of engagement wasn't a sign that they
didn't care. After all, if they truly didn't care, they wouldn't have been
planning to vote. The undecided voters I talked to did care about politics,
or at least judged it to be important; they just didn't enjoy politics. The
mere fact that you're reading this article right now suggests that you not
only think politics is important, but you actually like it. You read the
paper and listen to political radio and talk about politics at parties. In
other words, you view politics the way a lot of people view cooking or
sports or opera: as a hobby. Most undecided voters, by contrast, seem to
view politics the way I view laundry. While I understand that to be a
functioning member of society I have to do my laundry, and I always
eventually get it done, I'll never do it before every last piece of clean
clothing is dirty, as I find the entire business to be a chore. A
significant number of undecided voters, I think, view politics in exactly
this way: as a chore, a duty, something that must be done but is altogether
unpleasant, and therefore something best put off for as long as possible. A
disturbing number of undecided voters are crypto-racist isolationists. In
the age of the war on terror and the war in Iraq, pundits agreed that this
would be the most foreign policy-oriented election in a generation--and
polling throughout the summer seemed to bear that out. In August the Pew
Center found that 40 percent of voters were identifying foreign policy and
defense as their top issues, the highest level of interest in foreign policy
during an election year since 1972. But just because voters were unusually
concerned about foreign policy didn't mean they had fundamentally shifted
their outlook on world affairs. In fact, among undecided voters, I
encountered a consistent and surprising isolationism--an isolationism that
September 11 was supposed to have made obsolete everywhere but the left and
right fringes of the political spectrum. Voters I spoke to were concerned
about the Iraq war and about securing American interests, but they seemed
entirely unmoved by the argument--accepted, in some form or another, by just
about everyone in Washington--that the security of the United States is
dependent on the freedom and well-being of the rest of the world.
In fact, there was a disturbing trend among undecided voters--as well as
some Kerry supporters--towards an opposition to the Iraq war based largely
on the ugliest of rationales. I had one conversation with an undecided,
sixtyish, white voter whose wife was voting for Kerry. When I mentioned the
"mess in Iraq" he lit up. "We should have gone through Iraq like shit
through tinfoil," he said, leaning hard on the railing of his porch. As I
tried to make sense of the mental image this evoked, he continued: "I mean
we should have dominated the place; that's the only thing these people
understand. ... Teaching democracy to Arabs is like teaching the alphabet to
rats." I didn't quite know what to do with this comment, so I just thanked
him for his time and slipped him some literature. (What were the options?
Assure him that a Kerry White House wouldn't waste tax dollars on literacy
classes for rodents?) That may have been the most explicit articulation I
heard of this mindset--but it wasn't an isolated incident. A few days later,
someone told me that he wished we could put Saddam back in power because he
"knew how to rule these people." While Bush's rhetoric about spreading
freedom and democracy played well with blue-state liberal hawks and
red-state Christian conservatives who are inclined towards a missionary view
of world affairs, it seemed to fall flat among the undecided voters I spoke
with. This was not merely the view of the odd kook; it was a common theme I
heard from all different kinds of undecided voters. Clearly the Kerry
campaign had focus groups or polling that supported this, hence its
candidate's frequent--and wince- inducing--America-first rhetoric about
opening firehouses in Baghdad while closing them in the United States. The
worse things got in Iraq, the better things got for Bush. Liberal
commentators, and even many conservative ones, assumed, not unreasonably,
that the awful situation in Iraq would prove to be the president's undoing.
But I found that the very severity and intractability of the Iraq disaster
helped Bush because it induced a kind of fatalism about the possibility of
progress. Time after time, undecided voters would agree vociferously with
every single critique I offered of Bush's Iraq policy, but conclude that it
really didn't matter who was elected, since neither candidate would have any
chance of making things better. Yeah, but what's Kerry gonna do? voters
would ask me, and when I told them Kerry would bring in allies they would
wave their hands and smile with condescension, as if that answer was
impossibly naïve. C'mon, they'd say, you don't really think that's going to
work, do you? To be sure, maybe they simply thought Kerry's promise to bring
in allies was a lame idea--after all, many well-informed observers did. But
I became convinced that there was something else at play here, because
undecided voters extended the same logic to other seemingly intractable
problems, like the deficit or health care. On these issues, too, undecideds
recognized the severity of the situation--but precisely because they
understood the severity, they were inclined to be skeptical of Kerry's
ability to fix things. Undecided voters, as everyone knows, have a deep
skepticism about the ability of politicians to keep their promises and solve
problems. So the staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush
administration and the demonstrably poor state of world affairs seemed to
serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in
general. Kerry, by mere dint of being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by
Bush's failures as badly as Bush was. As a result, undecideds seemed oddly
unwilling to hold the president accountable for his previous actions,
focusing instead on the practical issue of who would have a better chance of
success in the future. Because undecideds seemed uninterested in assessing
responsibility for the past, Bush suffered no penalty for having made things
so bad; and because undecideds were focused on, but cynical about, the
future, the worse things appeared, the less inclined they were to believe
that problems could be fixed--thereby nullifying the backbone of Kerry's
case. Needless to say, I found this logic maddening. Undecided voters don't
think in terms of issues. Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters
is that they are undecided because of the "issues." That is, while they
might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while
they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs.
Occasionally I did encounter undecided voters who were genuinely
cross-pressured--a couple who was fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and
pro-environment for example--but such cases were exceedingly rare. More
often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay
attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if
I'd just asked them to name their favorite prime number.
The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn't name a single issue
that was important to them. This was shocking to me. Think about it: The
"issue" is the basic unit of political analysis for campaigns, candidates,
journalists, and other members of the chattering classes. It's what makes up
the subheadings on a candidate's website, it's what sober, serious people
wish election outcomes hinged on, it's what every candidate pledges to run
his campaign on, and it's what we always complain we don't see enough
coverage of. But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost
completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to. (This was also
true of a number of committed voters in both camps--though I'll risk being
partisan here and say that Kerry voters, in my experience, were more likely
to name specific issues they cared about than Bush supporters.) At first I
thought this was a problem of simple semantics--maybe, I thought, "issue" is
a term of art that sounds wonky and intimidating, causing voters to react as
if they're being quizzed on a topic they haven't studied. So I tried other
ways of asking the same question: "Anything of particular concern to you?
Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what's been
happening in the country in the last four years?" 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 cite one example: I had a conversation with an undecided truck driver who
was despondent because he had just hit a woman's car after having worked a
week straight. He didn't think the accident was his fault and he was angry
about being sued. "There's too many lawsuits these days," he told me. I was
set to have to rebut a "tort reform" argument, but it never came. Even
though there was a ready-made connection between what was happening in his
life and a campaign issue, he never made the leap. I asked him about the
company he worked for and whether it would cover his legal expenses; he said
he didn't think so. I asked him if he was unionized and he said no. "The
last job was unionized," he said. "They would have covered my expenses." I
tried to steer him towards a political discussion about how Kerry would
stand up for workers' rights and protect unions, but it never got anywhere.
He didn't seem to think there was any connection between politics and
whether his company would cover his legal costs. Had he made a connection
between his predicament and the issue of tort reform, it might have
benefited Bush; had he made a connection between his predicament and the
issue of labor rights, it might have benefited Kerry. He made neither, and
remained undecided. In this context, Bush's victory, particularly on the
strength of those voters who listed "values" as their number one issue,
makes perfect sense. Kerry ran a campaign that was about politics: He parsed
the world into political categories and offered political solutions. Bush
did this too, but it wasn't the main thrust of his campaign. Instead, the
president ran on broad themes, like "character" and "morals." Everyone feels
an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values--we all know
what's right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on
issues if they don't even grasp what issues are? Liberals like to point out
that majorities of Americans agree with the Democratic Party on the issues,
so Republicans are forced to run on character and values in order to win.
(This cuts both ways: I met a large number of Bush/Feingold voters whose
politics were more in line with the Republican president, but who admired
the backbone and gutsiness of their Democratic senator.) But polls that ask
people about issues presuppose a basic familiarity with the concept of
issues--a familiarity that may not exist. As far as I can tell, this leaves
Democrats with two options: either abandon "issues" as the lynchpin of
political campaigns and adopt the language of values, morals, and character
as many have suggested; or begin the long-term and arduous task of
rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary--of convincing
undecided voters to believe once again in the importance of issues. The
former strategy could help the Democrats stop the bleeding in time for 2008.
But the latter strategy might be necessary for the Democrats to become a
majority party again.