In order to understand the process I have my first set of questions

What are the reasons that people vote for a particular candidate?

Possible answers:

1. I want a say in who runs the country.
2. I want to make sure that the group I subscribe to (meaning political party) wins.
3. He/She is a nice man/woman.
4. He/She is the lesser of two evils.
5. Candidate stands for one issue I follow.
6. Candidate stands for multiple issues.
7. I have followed his/her career and are qualified for the job.
8. The other candidate looks bad on tv.
9. The other candidate did bad things in the past.


What I want to figure out is why people vote the way they do. Imagine you are voting for your State Senator (sorry nebraska - unicameral). You just moved to this new district from another state and your only policital memory that is carried over is your party affiliation (obviously Dem here). You get the paper and it has the League of Women's voter guide to the candidates running for this election. What will make your mind about which candidate you will choose. Let's say that there are Dem, Rep, Green, and Ind candidates. None of them are incumbents. The incumbent is a middle of the road independent that won because he saved 10 people in a fire and was the most popular person. He now wants to get back to his leaf blowing business.

How would you make your selection?

If you are asking people here to answer the question for themselves, you certainly will get an unrepresentative set of answers.

One you can add to the list is: "I like the candidate's name." In Ohio in the early 80s, the name "Brown" was considered a considerable advantage, especially in judicial races. They still have Sherrod Brown, so maybe things haven't changed much. --Closely related, of course, is "I have heard of him" -- a big part of the incumbency advantage is name recognition. But there was no incumbent in your example. (Similarly, there is the idea that people will vote for or against the incumbent party based on job satisfaction -- which doesn't apply in your example, either.)

And you can add "so-and-so told me to" (where so-and-so might be a friend, a preacher, or whatever).

A caveat is that many people will tell you that they choose based on the issues, or on the candidates -- but their perceptions of the issues and the candidates are shaped by their partisan predispositions. We all (?) like to think we are independent-minded, but the political psychologists say not so much.

So, there's a classic model (or picture) called the "funnel of causality." At the wide end of the funnel is broad social conditions, then group loyalties and core values, then party identification, then issue opinions, then candidate evaluations, and finally a vote emerges. The stuff at the wide end influences everything further down the funnel, but of course there are other influences as well.

I could go on, but I don't know what you are really trying to figure out!

like how alot of people thought McCain was a true independent that happened to be remuglican. Then were surprised that McCain turned out to be a Bush brown noser. I don't know, maybe its me, but if someone did to me what GW did to McCain, I'd would be saying screw the party and voted against everything Bush wanted. Not good old McCain though, boy he was right there hugging good old GW and repeating every lie that the repigs have come out with. In another words, I won't vote for remuglicans period. Even a bad democratic politician is going to vote for certain good things once in awhile. Remuglicans tend to stick together and push through things that enrich the rich and line their own pockets with 30 pieces of silver. Name one remuglican that could be trusted to serve We the People and not mouth words then deregulate everything so the rich few can create monopolies. Look at the media, theres very few independent stations left in america, they all were taken over by the big 4, Fox,ABC,CBS, and NBC.

where voting is compulsory, some people vote for the candidate at the top of the list. It's called the donkey vote. They had to stop listing candidates in alphabetical order (aardvaarks were taking over the country).

The serious point being: why do people NOT vote? If we understood that, we might understand why people appear to behave in ways that seem implausible to those of us who do. Like forgetting who they voted for in 2000. Or whether they voted at all.

The scary thing about Gore Bush was hearing someone on Radio after the first debate (which Gore was deemed to have "won") that Gore seemed a bit too smart, and the Bush was more the sort of guy he'd like to have a drink with.

The first question to ask is what is the whole point of this process? I thought that asking why people vote is not necessarily to ask anyone here's personal method but an overall sense of why people make or not make their voting choices. Is the problem that voters are stupid and able to be manipulated by the media or by their party affiliation? Is that problem that not everyone votes? Is it that even if we make everyone vote (as in Oz), that we still get "donkey votes"?

Sidebar on the "donkey votes" - I did a test of 100 high school students where I made them vote on 20 identical ballots each for a total of 2000 ballots cast. I used the 2002 CA general election for Sacramento county. The kids were from east coast where they knew none of the candidates running. I asked them to fill out the ballots as fast as they could. My pupose was really to look for stray marks and missing contests on a ballot design. What I found that for the 13 races on the ballot, the second person named on the ballot was the winner on 12 of 13 races. The one where the second person listed did not win had a very short name that was shadowed by a larger third name (who won the race). That was strange.

Assuming we can fix the voting and counting part of elections, does this mean that we will never fix the people making smart decisions about their elected officials? Did the same guy that voted for his "drinking buddy" GW also vote for his "philandering buddy" Clinton?

People are complicated, so there is more than one problem -- and people are stubborn, so there is no agreement on which problems are most important or how to solve them. But you already knew that.

I encourage my students to start not from the vantage that "voters are stupid" but from the vantage of "rational ignorance." People know that their individual votes aren't likely to determine the outcome of an election (even assuming that the votes are fairly counted), because the statistical odds become smaller than the odds of being hit by a car on the way to the polling place. (Luckily, most people don't make and act on that particular calculation, or turnout would be much lower! Dunno, that particular factoid might be apocryphal -- the odds aren't unambiguous, but they are clearly pretty extreme.)

So, in part since people don't figure that their political judgments matter much anyway, people do tend to form them pretty carelessly from whatever happens to be 'lying around' (how the economy is, what their friends say, what they hear on Clear Channel, whatever). I tend to be in the camp that says that people generally do pretty well considering (my dissertation advisor co-authored The Rational Public, and you might say I am of that school), but in any particular case.... What is the saying, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time -- and come to think of it, those are pretty good odds"? For instance, people didn't really embrace Bush's tax cuts, but most of them have no idea just how skewed they were, and I definitely fault the media for that. (But don't get me wrong: rational ignorance, or however you want to think about it, puts a limit on how much most people are likely ever to know about political issues.)

Getting more people to vote definitely would not necessarily make things better, either for Democrats now, or in general. Democrats tend to imagine non-voters as natural Democrats (economic populists, at least), but at best it isn't that straightforward. Non-voters, unsurprisingly, tend to know less about politics than voters -- so forcing them to vote indeed won't necessarily lead to better collective decisions. As you put it, yeah, we will get donkey votes (but not necessarily the Democratic donkey). That doesn't mean I want to keep people from voting, but I'm more worried about the information they get.

(Interesting anecdote about how your high school students "voted.")

I think the drinking-buddy thing in 2004 was probably overblown. But many people did get the impression that Bush understood real people's lives better than Kerry did.

My own view is that people will vote for the person that collects the most empathy. I won the student council election for Treasurer in high school with one sentence = "We would have raised more money for the class if the principal did not change the policy on candy sales during school hours" That made me, a totally unqualified candidate beat out a girl that forgot more about being Treasurer than I knew. I just new what people wanted to hear. When Bush says that he is "working hard" in that whiny voice, people fall for it. Just like when Clinton says he "feels your pain".

When this country was founded only the white land owners were assumed to be the ones getting all this democracy. As someone that would still fit that category, a joke would be in order but my sarcasm does not translate well in print... I think that a Jefferson would say that if you were not a landowner, then you lived on someone elses land. That means that the landowner that you rent from has the obligation to keep your interests at heart especially when choosing a government. So in that vein maybe the education should be stressed to voters that if your neighbor does not vote, then your vote carries that much more weight and importance. Maybe that perspective will at least make it more important? I do not know.

more to come... wish i could type faster...