By definition, in fact. Unless swing voters and swing states do not exist.
Richard Murray acknowledges that the prevailing wisdom — that each party’s base is roughly forty percent of the electorate and about twenty percent of it is up for grabs — is out there. But what he goes on to say does nothing to counter that sentiment. The fact that they are not monolithic does not dispell the sentiment that they have one trait in common: they swing.
Like most politicos, he makes the error of thinking that swing voters have some sort of moderate, independent ideological leanings that can be appealed to; that there’s a specific ‘target’ to be hit. Unfortunately, from my dealings with swing voters and from simple deductive reasoning, it can be discerned that there’s only one thing that almost all swing voters have in common: they’re kind of dumb.
Now, yes, there are exceptions: there are the legitimately informed Reason-style voters who loathe the left’s love of judicial activism and economic interventionism as much as they loathe the right’s love of foreign intervention and legislation of morality. But those are not the mass of voters. Most swing voters, as Ann Coulter lovingly puts it, have the IQ of a toaster: if your ideology is coherent, you’ll naturally be attracted to one party or the other. Otherwise, you’re just wishy-washy. To so many swing voters, nothing exists outside of itself; gun control is really just about gun control, not about property rights. Their thoughts on an issue might boil down to: well, that doesn’t seem right. Or: well, he seems pretty confident. Or: he certainly puts me at ease; he seems like a good leader. I can trust him. It’s nothing more than that to so many people. The Volokh Conspiracy blog does a good job of outlining the ignorance of the swing voter (good news: Republicans tend to be the best-informed!).
It’s a sad irony of democracy that the most ignorant among us choose our elected representatives.
How does that make you feel?
May 28th, 2009 at 8:47 am
Alex,
But there are more than two coherent ideologies out there, some of which don’t fit all that well with either party. So there can be a lot of intelligent, coherent paleo-cons, libertarians, isolationist-socialists, etc…. that have one or more major problems with both parties. How they weight the deficiencies of each party will vary from election to election, depending on the pressing issues of the day.
For instance, a libertarian might vote for Kerry in ’04, stressing the desire to minimize our militarism, but vote for McCain in ’08, perceiving the budget busting, liberty trampling promises of candidate Obama as a more immediate threat that the quagmire of the Middle East. Such a shift does not mean the voter is dumb, inconsistent, or unprincipled. It means how he assesses less-than-ideal matches necessarily changes with prevailing economic and political conditions.
May 28th, 2009 at 8:56 am
MY dad was a swing voter. Everytime he got to the voting booth, he asked my mom who to vote for. He wasn’t dumb, in fact he was much more intelligent than anyone writer on this site, but he had no ideology, and I guess he just didn’t care.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:02 am
1 – Did you even read beyond the title? Go back and read the article, please.
2 – So in other words, he was ignorant of politics.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Alex: I couldn’t disagree with you more. Most idiotic voters are Democrats. They vote as they are told.
Swing Voters tend to be apathetic. They tend only to vote when there is an issue or issues that motivate them. Often these are paycheck voters. They vote often based on what they perceived as in the best interest of their pocket book. Many of them shifted to Obama because of the failure of the stock market and the growing unemployment rate and the fact that republicans put up a bad candidate who had no clue how to handle the economy, we lost big. However, if Obama doesn’t fix things and things continue as they are, we can expect a complete reversal if we don’t put up a bad candidate again. Who ever is the nominee must understand the economy and be credible on it.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:14 am
2. Ignorant by choice, but not dumb as you seem to insist.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:15 am
Alex,
Have you ever seen this? You may find it interesting:
http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=949
Also, re #1, I think we differ in degree, as I would quibble with the notion “if your ideology is coherent, you’ll naturally be attracted to one party or the other.” Many voters with a coherent ideology find one party less revolting than the other, but that does not mean they are attracted to it.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Toomey within nine of Specter
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1327.xml?ReleaseID=1304
May 28th, 2009 at 9:36 am
This is the most compelling argument I’ve seen for Huckabee.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:57 am
I think in many cases swing voters may be more intelligent than base voters because they’re less likely to be persuaded by pandering, narratives, distortions, or emotional appeals.
Sarah Palin (or John Edwards, or…), for example, is someone who is capable of driving out intelligent voters when she does her Joe Sixpack routine.
I felt that the Bush administration was insulting my intelligence on many occasions. “Do you really expect me to buy that idiotic drivel?”, etc.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:08 am
I consider myself an independent, but obviously lean Republican.
I don’t consider myself ignorant but find myself becoming more cynical the more I learn.
It seems it doesn’t really matter who is in power.
You can have a president who claims he is conservative and a conservative house and senate and the can spend and run up the deficit to their hearts content.
It almost seems better to have a democratic president with a strong republican house and senate that holds the president’s feet to the fire.
Obviously this isn’t always true. Reagan did a pretty good job of managing a democratic house and senate. He didn’t accomplish as much as people give him credit for, but given his situation he did a remarkable job and reshaped the political landscape.
Obviously right now is the worst possible situation with the Democrats controlling all levels of the federal government.
I also find myself leaning toward voting for the house and senate based on ideology and the president based on pragmatism. I want the president to have practical managerial skills not matter his ideology. I’m not convinced that Obama is a good manager. He certainly doesn’t have the experience.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:13 am
[...] Alex and Richard make some astute points with their analysis of swing voters. Both parties have/do lay claim to roughly 40% of the electorate with the remaining 20% deciding the outcome of our national elections. In a sense both men are correct and incorrect in their descriptions of these voters and the direction the GOP should take to fight for their votes. I disagree with both gentleman is on the political leanings and intelligence of these voters. [...]
May 28th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Alex, as one of your supporters on this site I couldn’t disagree more.
While there probably are dumb or wishy-washy voters out there, certainly you can see how a voter with one of a few certain ideologies would have major issues with either political party, and yet still feel compelled to vote in every election for whomever they like more or dislike the least.
Social conservative economic liberal blue dog blue collar dems come to mind, as do the rudy loving hard right econ/defense social liberal republicans. In other words-you. I can’t say how you personally would have voted in this scenario, but I imagine people like you (myself included) would have abstained or voted dem this year if it was a fiscally moderate dem vs Mike Huckabee.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:43 am
May 28th, 2009 at 10:52 am
marK,
As I have gotten older, some issues have gotten grayer for me as well. Certainly there are still non-negotiable absolutes, but I’ve come to realize that someone who disagrees with me about taxes, trade, etc… is not, ipso facto, a moron.
May 28th, 2009 at 11:03 am
MWS,
Another great quote is Lincoln’s: “God must love the common man, he made so many of them”
May 28th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Disgusting worship of the mediocre alert.
May 28th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Alex, I don’t think I explained my meaning well enough. Try this example:
Take 100 people as your sample, with each one representing a point on a continuum of opinion on an issue (taxation on people making more than $200,000, for example). Each person wants to tax income based on their number (#1 wants a tax rate at 0%, #2 at 1%, and so on). Democrats’ base is #60 and up, Republicans is #40 and down. You might think both parties would target voter 50 in this case, thereby competing with the other party for the maximum number of voters, but they don’t (if they did, each party would be advocating identical positions, and they don’t). The reason is that, the further from your base you move, the more likely you are to start losing their votes (as they sit out the election and complain about not being represented). Different issues have different balancing points, so on some issues running at the central voter (50.5) isn’t sufficient to lose base votes to indifference, while others have a high volatility (say 30 or 71 being the point at which you start losing voters). My main point, after all that, is that, on balance, the parties target #40 or #61, and those two voters are certainly different voters. Yes, there is some overlap in these voters, but the target voter is very different. Because they are different voters, you can’t rely on the tactics of one party being effective for the other.
May 28th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
#16: “Disgusting worship of the mediocre alert.”
I would not put it so. More of a “Be careful not to become a legend in your own mind” alert. Or as my mother used to say, “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back”.
In my youth I was very much impressed with my superior intellect and the stupidity of those around me. Life has taught me, however, the wisdom of Ben Franklin’s words. I highly recommend you take them to heart — that is, of course, unless you feel you are greater than he.
June 1st, 2009 at 9:43 pm
I met this ho at a restaurant and she was so freaking dumb. She was probably a swing voter.