11.01.12
Ask the Heevahava
The reporter who solicits the views of the undecided voter in e-mail, or in person at hinterland rallies, never thinks they’re heevahavas. No, his or her undecided voters are always the most thoughtful of citizens.
In this manner, John Dickerson, a box of rocks looking for eyeballs at Slate, does his bit on the cliche, choosing to believe that someone who admires Mitt Romney because he is an “Etch-a-Sketch” is being more of a critical thinker than the rest of us.
This exercise was refreshing and faith restoring. That isn’t a knock against partisans. They care about the country enough to donate their time and energy to the cause. That makes them a necessary treasure to democracy. I spend a lot of time with partisans at rallies listening to their worries and hopes. But in the digital world, partisans are often full of certainties, snap judgments, and insults. The passion overwhelms illumination. These correspondents are undecided—or “still deciding,” as one put it in an effort to lessen the stigma—because they weigh the duty so heavily. More important, they all have a quality that has all but disappeared in this election: They pause long enough to hear the other side’s arguments. Not once in these emails did a voter write about one of the candidates’ supposed gaffes. They are the perfect combination: skeptical and thoughtful. They don’t trust politicians, the press, or pundits, but they treat the ideas of all of those players seriously enough to formulate an opinion of their own. If only the politicians trying to get their vote behaved the same way.
An academic brushes him off:
Political scientists tell us my respondents are not your typical undecided voters. In fact, according to Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA, the undecided voters are the exact opposite of those who responded to my request. They are not that involved in politics, they’re not reading up on the issues—or any issue since they tend not to follow the news—they’re not sure that their vote will matter, or they’re sick of the whole business. “When I look at the data, what I see is that the majority of [undecided voters] have a hard time making sense of the political world,??? says Vavreck. “The normal cues—party, ideology—that early voters use are like a foreign language to them.???
Another argument can be made. When you invite e-mails from a name organization your are bound to get replies from people who would like to see their words in print. And, it being e-mail, not off-the-cuff and face to face, you will get a certain amount of faux sincerity, massaged and rewritten to sound good. Which, of course, you will be inclined to pick for a superficial quality of “thoughtfulness.”
The Slate article uses a picture of someone not included in the story, that of Mr. Kelly Cox, a trucker from California, who appeared as the lede undecided voter in an AP story last week.
That’s lame. I guess Dickerson’s e-mail respondents just didn’t send in good head shots.