I took enough public opinion courses in grad school to sour me on the democratic process but good. Most people do not make rational voting decisions (even highly educated voters), and party affiliation is the single strongest predictor of voting outcomes. It's heartening to see an increase in independents, but all that does is make the outcome less clear, it doesn't mean that people are voting any *smarter*.
You are making a non-sequitor there. You say people vote irrationally, then you say that they vote a party ticket. But what is irrational about voting a party ticket? If you would strongly prefer one party, it would be very irrational to not support them usually. And given our current political makeup, most people strongly prefer one party. Unless you can explain to me why I as a liberal should prefer Jim DeMint to Alvin Greene, your argument is fallacious.
Btw, how many people use this extension? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd-substitutions/jkgogmboalmaijfgfhfepckdgjeopfhk
But if you ask most people, they'll insist that they "vote for the person, not the party". And then vote 95-99% of the time for candidates of the same party. You can't tell me that either major party has the best candidate 95-99% of the time in *any* district.
When I say that voters are irrational, I don't mean that they're crazy or stupid. It's that the things that drive their vote aren't the things they *think* are driving their vote. And the fact that cognitive dissonance is rampant when it comes to political opinions.
There was one study (i'll have to dig through my books to find the particulars) where they took a group of people and got them to take a stand on a particular issue (and recorded them). Then they had them sit through a lecture by a supposed expert stating why Thing A was bad. Then they re-polled them AND they asked them to put down what their initial stance had been. Almost everybody was against Thing A now. What was shocking was that many people who had changed their opinion listed their original opinion as being that Thing A was bad. When confronted with
recorded evidence that they had originally not been against Thing A, they still maintained that they had never changed their mind and had always been against Thing A.
Then a few days later, they had the *same expert* come back in and say that the data had turned out to be in error and that Thing A was actually not bad and it was all a mistake. Then they re-polled again. Most people didn't change their opinion and were still against Thing A.
This is why it's so goddamn important in politics to bet the one to set the narrative. If you claim that Obamacare is a disaster before it even starts out, people will think it's a disaster no matter what the actual results are. (The fact that the website launch *was* a disaster surely didn't help).
As for the former issue, let's take the Iraq War. It's very hard now to find people who will openly admit supporting going to war in Iraq in 2003. And yet, public opinion was very strong in favor of it. I know several former co-workers who personally gave me hell for being against the war, and within a few years were going "Man, I knew we should never have gotten involved there..."
The urge to bitchslap some of these people until their face glows is very, very strong at times.
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Topic: Bay12 Election Night Watch Party (Read 821277 times)