prediction and justification

So, for alot of us, it felt like 51% of the US electorate took a giant steaming dump on our values system on tuesday. And there’s some truth to that, though it’s more indirect than you may think.

This triumphal “values voter” that is splashed everywhere is dramatically overstated. And that’s something people ought to remember.

It was 22% of the motives, a bare plurality. But even more important than that is a little tidbit from psych: Humans are great at determining _what_ they will do. They suck at explaining _why_ they will do it (and presumably why they did it). I suspect the fact that Bush’s voters didn’t know the issues nearly as well as Kerry’s voters is more an indication that they didn’t care about them, rather than that they were underinformed. Asking what issue led you to vote for which candidate (especially if it’s multiple choice) is about like asking if you’ve stopped beating your wife: it’s loaded with assumptions. So not all of them deliberately took a steaming dump on our value system, many just didn’t care about it, or felt it was a minor consideration. (This is a massive generalization, I realize there are party loyalists on both sides who probably cast their vote in spite of their better judgement, and people who legitimately know, and agree with Bush’s policies, plus single issue pro-life (so long as it’s our babies, and not the citizens of other countries) voters, etc).

I’d like to back these claims up with facts, but I’m short on time so take it with a grain of salt, according to your natural inclinations.

There’s also the question of what constitutes a valid source of information for whom. Some people point to the bible as meaningful, while I, in heated annoyance derided it as a book of fairy tales (it is a little bit more than that, but not much, and again with the short on time.) Meanwhile, I view newssites (nytimes), deductive reasoning, and a few other things as valuable, while many who think the bible is solid fact would rationalize that away as liberal bias and irrelevant, incomprehensible wool-gathering.