A Pundit's Guide to Telepathy

What makes voters vote the way they do?  This is the question pundits ask their audience. It was the question they asked after Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee won Iowa, and it was certainly the pressing question when Hillary Clinton leaped ahead of polling numbers to steal a close victory in New Hampshire.  Huge demographics are sucked up into the rhetorical vacuums of Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer and host of other bloviators of the mainstream media narrative.   Age groupings, gender, urban vs. suburban vs. rural.  What does it matter whether what you say is true or not, so long as it sounds categorical and dramatic? An interesting fact: traditional Christian Evangelicals--conventionally know as the Christian right--vote 70% republican and 20% democratic.  Who are these 20% of traditional evangelicals voting for the Kerry's and Gore's of recent elections?  I have no idea.  In the eyes of the mainstream media they have not existed, although Mike Huckabee is changing that.
But the question of voter motivation itself is interesting, the attempt to visualize a collective voting consciousness, to imagine thousands of citizens all simultaneously blazing their decisions along the same logical track is oddly thrilling. I don't entirely agree with Arianna Huffington that we should ban polls because even when they are innacurate they tell us something. In the case of New Hampshire, thrillingness may have been part of problem. Especially this year.

Lets call it Sulzman's Law: The more dramatic and interesting an presidential contest = the inverse of accuracy amongst pre-voting polls.

I was in New Hampshire campaigning for Barack Obama this weekend, knocking doors, talking folks up, trying to change minds. I spoke to a woman who liked Barack Obama the best out of all the candidates but had decided to vote for Edwards purely out of an ever-diminishing but nevertheless firm loyalty to John Edwards from 2004. I only met her, but I am forced to assume that she was not the only one to make a similar decision. And it is a fascinating realization to realize that one person's voice, however idiosyncratic in its reasoning, represents the same conclusions of many more. Each voice speaks for many others although they may not realize this. The woman I spoke to was convinced that Obama would win easily, he did not need her vote. What she overestimated was the uniqueness of her thought process, as most of us tend to do.