September 29, 2004
Who’s making the decision?
I’m still stuck on this idea that the American public is so evenly divided. There’s a big chunk of us who have made up our minds, and polls seem to indicate that of this “decided” group we’re pretty darn evenly split (well, except according to the folks at Gallup) – maybe there’s a slight lead for Bush. Diving down in the swing states, there are other splits, all looking about the same.
It makes sense then that the campaigns would focus on the undecided voters, since that group could easily represent the winning margin for either candidate.
So the way I read this, a group of people who are either too busy or uninterested to pay attention to what’s going on in our country until the last minute are going to decide who’ll lead us for the next four year.
There really has to be a better way.
Posted by pgutwin at 9:22 PM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2004
Manipulating the Truth
There is an interesting article in the 8/30 edition of the New Yorker, about the number of voters who understand the choice they are making. Not surprisingly, only a small fraction of voters have a clue why they are choosing what they are choosing. They don’t understand what “fiscally conservative” or “private sector resource” actually means, much less how these doctrines or beliefs held by a candidate would actually guide their votes.
I’ve always looked at presidential elections as a test in the sense that we as a society are using the collective wisdom of the people to select the leader (and by transitivity the policies) out of some kind of group (OK, don’t get too wound up about the two party system issue right now…) that should guide us in the coming 4 years. What’s really fascinating to me is that it’s really hard to get tests to come out 50-50. This is a special result, much like zero and 100 (or unity) – it means that there’s something very unusual about the test or the population sample. The meaning of the result takes a lot of analysis, and what I’m hearing from almost all sources is something along the lines of “Boy, the two parties sure have polarized the electorate” – as if this explains why the country is divided almost exactly in half on some very fundamental issues.
The article in the New Yorker went on to explain that people appear to use what are called “heuristics” to reason about their choices. Heuristics are sort of “rules of thumb” that people live by – brand name association (Ford BAD, Chevy GOOD) and such things. I think these should be more accurately called “labels”, and it’s pretty clear that both political parties try to manipulate these labels.
To my way of thinking this is really manipulating prejudice. We’re working like mad to eliminate it socially – but it’s just as ugly and destructive when it’s done by the party faithful to achieve some worthy goal like getting your guy in office.
Posted by pgutwin at 9:08 PM | Comments (0)