Forget 15%; try 90%.
And so I’m feeling shitty about the (yes, irrational) analogy that finishes off the rant below, which was on shaky ground to start off with, proceeded with some little rhetorical deftness to a point of questionable taste, and never got around to any sort of disclaimer or safety instructions; just chuck the whole thing before it gets out of hand, okay?
Because Barry points us to this New Yorker piece which reminds us all that squabbling over 3% here and 11% there has nothing to do with actually winning elections and everything to do with stoning apostates and kicking the exiles’ bread and salt into the ashes: makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something for about five minutes, and then what?
Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don’t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor. And voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that “2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet” as a consequence of that year’s weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.
The at-once depressing and uplifting moral to take from all of this is simply to realize: voting is terribly important. It’s absolutely vital. It’s also the least important thing we can do, politically.
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