which explains their unprecedented confusion. Consumer-oriented researchers are getting to the bottom of it all:
Voter Disgust Isn’t Only About IssuesKEANSBURG, N.J. — If you tune in to any of this week’s candidate debates around the country, or watch any of the ads that are beginning to dominate the airwaves, you will hear that next month’s midterm elections are about all the things you probably thought they were about: job losses and federal spending, the health care law and the Obama agenda.
And yet,
if Democrats lose their grip on Congress in November, President Obama would become the third consecutive president to see his party tossed from power on his watch — a sequence that has never happened before in the country’s tumultuous political history. This suggests that, however much the issues of the moment may seem to be defining these elections, there are some deeper forces at work, too.
A conversation among a group of independent voters in this working-class town may illuminate at least one such longer-term trend.The fast growth in the number of independent voters — a broad category that includes some voters who tend to identify more with one major party than the other, as well as a lot of Americans who are skeptical of both — has been making American politics more volatile. According to a Pew Center poll completed a few weeks ago, the Republican advantage at the moment is mostly grounded in the party’s 13-point lead among independents, which is about the same margin by which those voters supported Democratic candidates in 2006 and Mr. Obama in 2008.
...But a group of New York-based consultants who specialize in corporate marketing, taking on tasks like predicting the behavior of shoppers in supermarkets, have been experimenting with a different approach. The three researchers — Jeff Levine, a pollster who has worked for Democratic candidates, and the marketing consultants Claire Tondreau and Christopher Brace — have been convening small groups of self-identified independent voters who are friends or relatives of one another, and convening focus groups in a participant’s living room.
No campaign or client is sponsoring the research, and no one is looking to “move” the voters with slogans or ad scripts. In fact, very little, if anything, is even mentioned about partisan politics. Instead, the facilitator asks the half-dozen or so voters to invent their own countries and to compare their idealized versions with the country they actually live in.
...These voters did not hate politicians.
They simply saw both parties, along with the media and big business, as symptoms of the larger societal ailment. And this underlying perception, that politicians in Washington conduct themselves just as childishly and with the same lack of accountability as the kids throwing chicken casserole in the lunchroom, may well be the principal emotion behind the electorate’s propensity to vote out whoever holds power.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/us/politics/07bai.html?ref=politicsI don't know, Matt. I think that by refusing to stick with anything for more than one election cycle and claiming a false equivalency between Republicans and Democrats, Americans are refusing to come to grips with certain realities. That the country's once unchallenged place in the world had a lot to do with postwar advantages that no longer exist rather than an eternal claim to greatness. That using selfishness as the primary path to putting the country on a better path has failed. And that "independent" is far more likely to mean "frivolous" and "limited attention span" than actual Independence. But I suppose I should yield to wisdom of your "unbiased" reseaschers...
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