In Search of Rational Voters

[babylonsister]

In Search of Rational Voters

Do such creatures exist? How can we mint more of them?
Shawn Patrick Oullette / AP

By Alan Ehrenhalt | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Sep 10, 2008 | Updated: 12:28 p.m. ET Sep 10, 2008


"The people have spoken—the bastards!" It can be an effective line, especially when candidates employ it jokingly to lighten the somber mood of their supporters after a deflating loss at the polls. But it's also a dangerous thing to say: If there's one thing any aspirant for any office is reluctant to do, it's insult the electorate. He may need them again in two years.

Still, every once in a while a losing candidate has the guts and irreverence to try some variant of this jibe. The political gadfly Dick Tuck, defeated in a state Senate campaign in California in the 1950s, seems to have introduced it to modern campaigning. The equally witty Morris Udall used it on the night he lost the Wisconsin presidential primary to Jimmy Carter in 1976.

I don't know where the line originated, and I don't particularly care. What interests me is that this is about as far as any losing candidate is ever willing to go in taking on the voters. It's barely acceptable, on rare occasions, to make a joking reference to them as hostile ingrates. What you can't do is question their mental capacity. No candidate has ever begun a concession speech by saying, "The voters have spoken—the fools!"

That's in large part because it would be received almost universally as a gesture of tasteless arrogance. But there's another reason politicians carefully avoid questioning the intelligence of the electorate. They avoid it because they want desperately to believe that the American voters, whatever mistakes they may make, are at bottom rational and competent.

It's not just candidates and office-holders who feel need to believe this. Scholars who study voting behavior feel it, too. V. O. Key Jr., perhaps the most eminent American political scientist of the mid-20th century, wrote a book in the early 1960s called "The Responsible Electorate" and stated in the very beginning that its purpose was to convince readers that "voters are not fools." Thirty years later, another respected scholar, Samuel Popkin, made similar arguments at greater length in a book he chose to call "The Reasoning Voter."

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http://www.newsweek.com/id/158224

[elocs]

1. I worked for Mo Udall in 1976. He would have been a good president.

I wonder how many there are who still remember Udall? I think in the primary here in Wisconsin that Carter managed to pull in the rural farm vote. A win here certainly set the Carter campaign on the track to victory.