If the latest election were a horse race, the Cape Charles Mirror could have made a lot of money at the track, as we accurately predicted the outcome. We did this without sophisticated polling, or elaborate demographic modeling software. It was instead accomplished by using the basic observation that the Cape Charles voter is predictably irrational.
In his essay The Irrational Electorate, Larry M. Bartels provides an analysis that sheds some light on the local Cape Charles electorate, and attempts to illuminate what leads them to vote the way they do. Bartel’s points to Paul Lazarsfeld of Columbia University who concluded that electoral choices “are relatively invulnerable to direct argumentation” and “characterized more by faith than by conviction and by wishful expectation rather than careful prediction of consequences.” In our town, for example, voters consistently misperceived where candidates stood on the important issues of the day, seeing their favorite candidates’ stands as closer to their own and opposing candidates’ stands as more dissimilar than they actually were. (Bernard Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William N. McPhee, Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (University of Chicago Press, 1954), 311.)
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