POLITICS - Manipulation of the Voter

In the linked article below there are several paragraphs that address a comment made by a reader of Lean Left blog. These paragraphs are very good points addressing my title for this post.

My readers may not agree with "tgirsch", but these points are worth thinking about.

"More on 'Meaningless' Midterms" by tgirsch, Lean Left

• [T]hat surfaces another flaw in your original premise: general opinion surveys don’t often account for the relative importance of various issues or for the strength with which people’s views are held.

Comment by David Opderbeck

He goes on at quite a bit greater length, and I responded to him in the comments there, but there are several things about this that I felt needed to be flushed out in greater detail. First, and most important, is that I think David is consistently conflating ignorance with stupidity. The fact is, most people just don’t pay all that close of attention to politics. In this regard, we bloggers and blog readers are the exception, not the rule. Don’t believe me? Start randomly asking people on the street to name five current Supreme Court justices, or how their representative/senators voted on a particular issue, or to even name their representatives and senators. You won’t get a very good success rate here.

But a more basic problem, I think, is that David is operating from a poor (or maybe naïve) understanding of human psychology. What do I mean by this? I think that his arguments are predicated on two flawed basic assumptions: first, that the typical voter is reasonably well informed about the issues and where each candidate stands on those issues; and second, that voting is a purely (or at least primarily) rational act.

David would be right, and it would be accusing voters of “stupidity” to suggest that they’ve gotten informed about all the issues, considered everything rationally, and decided to vote against their interests. That’s not what I’m suggesting at all. What I’m suggesting, instead, is that because candidates spend a great deal of time manipulating the emotions of the electorate, and obfuscating both their own positions and the positions of their opponents, voters often make ill-informed, irrational decisions.

• [T]hat surfaces another flaw in your original premise: general opinion surveys don’t often account for the relative importance of various issues or for the strength with which people’s views are held.

Another Comment by David Opderbeck

This, at least, is a good point, but David’s problem here is that he ignores the extent to which these preferences and strength-of-views can be manipulated. Again, this is not “stupidity,” it’s human nature. Ask anyone who works in advertising or public relations just how easy it can often be to get human emotion to trump rationality, or how easy it is to manufacture preferences that didn’t previously exist. That’s what I’m saying is a threat to democracy, and that’s why I suggest that there’s often such a stark disparity between poll results and the way people vote.

One more thing of note on this is that over the years, the Republicans have gotten very, very good at recognizing which issues they poll well on, and then making the election all about those issues, avoiding those issues where they don’t do so well. And the latter generally far outnumber the former. At the outset of the election season, such issues may not be high on the list, and the GOP has excelled at making them high on the list. They managed to make the 2002 election all about Iraq in this manner, even though Iraq (rightly) was nowhere in the public consciousness at the time. They worked hard to put it there, to the exclusion of virtually all other issues. In 2004, with the Iraq war already starting to lose support, the bogeyman of gay marriage arose, and was pounded repeatedly.This, by the way, is where our terrible news media have failed us miserably. They’re the only ones who have any ability to cut through the partisan BS (on either side) and don’t do this. They’re the ones who could effectively keep politicians from changing the subject, and they don’t do this.

The last paragraph above is the devil in our politics. The GOP, the party of big business, has become the best users of advertising agency manipulation of the "buyer," in this context the voter. They are selling politics like they sell soap or cars or TVs. Add to that the media's lack of true oversite in the area of American politics, gives politicians (especially GOP) an escape from transparency and ethical truthfulness.

Of course in the end, it is voter laziness in NOT studying the issues or candidates, and allowing themselves to be manipulated.