WHAT PEOPLE REALLY THINK ABOUT POLITICS
2004-08-23
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?040830crat_atlarge
If the excerpt below is true, we have Florida (After Hurricaine #4) in the bag! mk
EXCERPT:
And voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that "2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet" as a consequence of that year's weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.
LOUIS MENAND, NEW YORKER - In election years from 1952 to 2000, when people were asked whether they cared who won the Presidential election, between twenty-two and forty-four per cent answered "don't care" or "don't know." In 2000, eighteen per cent said that they decided which Presidential candidate to vote for only in the last two weeks of the campaign; five per cent, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted.
Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time.
Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don't understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls
conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare,
and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor. (SEE LINK ABOVE FOR FULL ARTICLE)