Are We The Voters Rational?
Clearly, some voters are rational in their thinking about which presidential candidate deserves their vote. Denise Rock, in her January 11 post, recommended a selection process we would all do well to adopt. I’ve thought a lot about the candidates, but I was not as rigorous in making my choice as she was.
I recently read a post on another blog about a couple who listed the ten factors that most concerned them, ranked the factors with numerical weights, then compared the candidates against their weighted priority list. That sounds both logical and rigorous.
Blithe Damour, in an earlier post, recommended one of the select-a-candidate websites that are designed to help voters make reasoned choices about their candidates. Such tools are imperfect, but they do make us question our decisions. What strikes me about these websites is that they often suggest choices we don’t accept, for one reason or another. I don’t have any reliable statistics, but I keep hearing of instances where Representative Kucinich comes out on top of a Democratic voter’s select-a-candidate list, but the voter opts for another candidate in spite of the computer’s advice.
In this connection, I read a January 11 New York Times story by Eric Konigsberg about former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, who recently endorsed Senator Clinton. He stated he was supporting Clinton, even though he liked Senator Obama as a person he would more like to have “in your living room every day for four years.” Then Kerrey said that after being prodded he took one of the select-a-candidate online quizzes, which suggested that the candidate who most closely matched his views is – you guessed it – Representative Kucinich.
I think the bigger problem is in the choice of questions on the select-a-candidate websites, but I believe there is more to it than that. My point is not that we should all have voted for Kucinich, and certainly not that we should let a website make our decision for us, but that we should, as Denise pointed out, question our own thinking process before casting that ballot.
The piece of information that got me on to this issue again was a poll result I read yesterday (damn the polls!) that showed that Mayor Giuliani had dropped from a 22% favorable rating to 10% in about a month’s time. Does this mean that even if we make an informed decision about who we support, if we don’t see much press on that candidate for thirty days because he or she is not campaigning in the states that are getting the media attention (Iowa and N.H. in this case), that we lose interest in the candidate? Must our decisions be continually reinforced by the media? Can select-a-candidate websites help us make better decisions? Or, in this case, were voters simply swayed by new, more complete information about the candidates?
