That’s because while we have free will, we are not all that unpredictable. Take me, for example. If you tell a pollster that I am a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male who wears a suit and tie to work, they’ll start out by placing me tentatively in the Republican column.
Add that I am 56 and have a six-figure household income, and I am even more apt to be a conservative. But now add that I am an academic and a journalist. Whoops. Suddenly I get moved over to the “leans Democratic” side. Add that I am not a member of any church, and they’ll even more definitely peg me as leaning left.
Much as we love to assert our independence, we are all to a large extent shaped by our backgrounds and the present circumstances of our lives.
The two major parties know we are creatures of habit.
Consequently, they put together packages designed to somehow lure a bare majority of us. The brilliant conservative journalist Jude Wanniski said the party system works like this:
Say that the American people essentially want chicken.
The Democrats are offering them turkey. The Republicans are offering them duck, and the voters has to try to figure out which is more like chicken. Occasionally, you’ll get a rogue candidate like Barry Goldwater or
George McGovern who appears to be offering them snake, and that’s when you get a landslide.
But otherwise we are pretty stable. The main thesis of The American Voter Revisited is that voting behavior hasn’t changed a lot since the original book came out in 1960. In the sense of how people make up their minds, that may well be true. But I think the authors may be a little too close to their methodology.
Think about it: Who in 1960 could have imagined the Democratic Party nominating a black man for President?
Nobody in 1960 could have imagined that gay marriage ever would be a national issue, or that most of the cars sold in the United States would be manufactured by foreign companies.
When The American Voter was published the most reliable Republican state was Vermont. But the Republicans don’t win it anymore. The most Democratic state in 1960 was Georgia. It was hopeless from the start for Al Gore and John Kerry.
Nor do economic factors play as large a role in voting decisions as they once did. Social and cultural factors have become huge.
Grosse Pointe Park and Grand Rapids were Republican fortresses in 1960. George W. Bush lost them. But he won Macomb County, once the most Democratic suburban county in the nation.
We’re the same people with the same two parties, but we’re changing all the time. That may give political scientists fits …
But I love it.
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