Undecided Voters Really Are Just Stupid

VIA digby

Christopher Hayes at TNR knocked on more than 1,000 doors and talked to hundreds of Wisconsin residents in an attempt to convince them to vote for John Kerry. His conclusion is what I had suspected for quite some time, they're not special, but just as stupid as everyone else. He has a few observations:

• Undecided voters aren't as rational as you think

  ....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......



• Undecided voters do care about politics; they just don't enjoy politics

  .....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 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.



• The worse things got in Iraq, the better things got for Bush

  .....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.......

  [That one is hard to argue with]


• Undecided voters don't think in terms of issues

  ....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......

So the American voter cares but not enough to find out what's going on. In most cases they were not even aware of the phony side of the issues the cable tabloid networks were pushing. Just as I thought all along, you can't just blame the TV news you have to blame the American people who simply don't care enough. Click on the link and read the entire article, he has a lot of really great anecdotes.
Thoughts from Bill in DC
Christopher Hayes' article in my view explains better than almost anything else I've read why Bush won. Although Mr. Hayes' article describes his experiences with voters who remained undecided in final weeks of the campaign, I believe it applies to a much broader segment of the electorate. These voters don't see any connection between their choices at the polls and the "issues." They don't want to engage with or think hard about "issues"; instead, they vote their prejudices and invoke the empty concept of "values" to explain their decisions. Because they make essentially irrational decisions, they are easily manipulated with the powerful tools that the media provide, just as their choices as consumers are manipulated by the media through advertising. The far right has proven more effective than any other segment of the political spectrum at manipulating the resolutely willful ignorance of these voters (perhaps because the far right is more ruthless and less constrained by scruples...or even by facts). That, in my view, explains why the United States is sliding further and further to the right, into a one-party system that is essentially an elected right-wing dictatorship.

What can Democrats (and moderate Republicans) do without selling their souls? I have no idea, but with all due respect for Mr. Hayes, I don't think that "rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary" and convincing these voters "to believe once again in the importance of issues" is a possibility. These voters just don't want to engage with issues and no amount of persuasion is going to induce them to do so.

Bill in DC