“2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet”

Since December of 2000, my enthusiasm for electoral politics has been tempered by the suspicion that my vote, while Civically Important, is statistically meaningless. This has dampened my willingness to engage in whole-hearted, full-throttle hatred of George W. Bush this year, even though it's fairly clear that he's the most dishonest, damaging, and corrupt U.S. President since Harding. When I say "fairly clear", I mean that anyone who bothers to educate themselves beyond the major news outlet headlines and the hasty, word-of-mouth opinions of friends and family will be able to assemble a vaguely coherent understanding of Bush's baseness. But that doesn't happen. In the August 30th, 2004 New Yorker, there's a Louis Menand piece called The Unpolitical Animal:

When pollsters ask people for their opinion about an issue, people generally feel obliged to have one. Their answer is duly recorded, and it becomes a datum in a report on “public opinion.” But, after analyzing the results of surveys conducted over time, in which people tended to give different and randomly inconsistent answers to the same questions, [political scientist Philip] Converse concluded that “very substantial portions of the public” hold opinions that are essentially meaningless—off-the-top-of-the-head responses to questions they have never thought about, derived from no underlying set of principles. These people might as well base their political choices on the weather. And, in fact, many of them do. ******************* [Princeton political scientist Larry] Bartels has also found that when people do focus on specific policies they are often unable to distinguish their own interests. His work, which he summed up in a recent article for The American Prospect, concerned public opinion about the estate tax. When people are asked whether they favor Bush’s policy of repealing the estate tax, two-thirds say yes—even though the estate tax affects only the wealthiest one or two per cent of the population. ******************* [Stanford political scientist] Fiorina points out that the ideological position of a candidate is not identical to the position of the people who vote for him or her. He suggests that people generally vote for the candidate whose views strike them as closest to their own, and “closest” is a relative term. With any two candidates, no matter how far out, one will always be “closer” than the other. Of course, if Converse is correct, and most voters really don’t have meaningful political beliefs, even ideological “closeness” is an artifact of survey anxiety, of people’s felt need, when they are asked for an opinion, to have one. This absence of “real opinions” is not from lack of brains; it’s from lack of interest. “The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field,” the economic theorist Joseph Schumpeter wrote, in 1942. “He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests." ******************

I didn't really intend for this to be another depressing doomsayer diatribe-post fetishizing ennui, and I hope it doesn't come off that way. Or maybe I do... Fetishes are sexy...