Chopping up the Electorate

(Submitted by Fish)

I’m a woman.

Whew, now that that’s out of the closet, we can move on.

Seriously, I’ve had to think a lot about my identity these days.  First, I’m a married woman, and then also a mother.  I’m a working woman, but only part time, so that really qualifies more as a stay-at-home mother.  But YOU try to teach dozens of wriggly, active, squirmy elementary students anything three days a week and tell me that isn’t work.  I’m also a PTA mom.  Ever tried to organize a carnival event for several hundred families using only a dozen volunteers?  No?  I didn’t think so.  And that one I did for free.  Add to the mix a healthy coupon addiction and a frequently overwhelming addiction to reading everything from mysteries to economics books.  Throw in some political activism, some campaign work, some church volunteering, some semi-professional puppetry and you have a little glimpse of my life.

Why is any of that important?  Well, it might not be to you, but it is crucial to political campaign operatives.  Those guys study me.  They toss mounds of data about me into computer programs and pore over the results.  They get together in War Rooms and assign points to things they notice.

“One point; she voted in primaries the last ten years.”

“Drop a point; she’s a woman.”

“Add two points; she gave money to a campaign.”

They profile me and decide, based on what they can discover, whether to spend campaign resources on trying to attract my vote.  “Big deal,” you say.  No, you’re right, not really.  I expect it.  I’m immune.  You probably also have several trees’ worth of political advertising sent to your house each political cycle as well.  I really never minded.

Until this cycle.

When you read all the election postmortems, you’ll notice that they almost invariably break down the results by age, class, race, occupation, gender, favorite ice cream flavor.  “Blacks voted for Obama.”  “Hispanics voted for Obama.”  “Married men voted for McCain.”  “Single women voted for Obama.”  “Whites voted for McCain, except when they didn’t.”

It’s useful to know that if you work for a campaign.  You can size up all the efforts you made to court each group and measure that against your results.  You can analyze the results and craft the next campaign around improving your strategy.  You can carve out groups to concentrate on and drop others from your radar altogether.  I work campaigns.  I use this knowledge.  I get the concept.

But here’s my disconnect.  When it comes to group mentalities, I get offended.  And I don’t mean “Oh, I wish they wouldn’t classify people like that” offended.  I’m talking “Oh my stars, are we assuming people do not THINK for themselves?” offended.  What got me started down this road was a forum discussion about the role of Hispanics in the presidential election.  It could have just as easily been about blacks or women or gays.  Reports were coming in regularly about how McCain lost ground on the inroads Bush had made with Hispanics.  People on the forum were incredulous.

“Hispanics are Catholic!  How can they not be pro-life?”

“Hispanics are all about opportunity.  How can they not support McCain on economic grounds?”

It went on and on.  And the more I looked at it, the more I realized what the problem seemed to be with the conservative message to groups of voters, such as Hispanics or blacks or women, as transmitted by the current GOP leadership. The challenge of the GOP was, and is still, to transmit the message of conservative values in such a way that it speaks to people no matter what their division. Essentially they are asking people to choose between portions of their identity; the one that agrees with the values of conservatism and the one that fits their group identity.

Which one do they chose?

Political consultants and politicians bank on voters landing firmly on group identity.  They have to.  And in an ever-increasingly compartmentalized nation rife with special interest groups, they would be fools not to.  And yet, each vote is still cast by a person, one person, not a group.

The analysts say group politics is here to stay.  They report that chopping up the electorate into manageable, predictable parts is the nature of the political landscape from now on.  I really pray that isn’t so, that individual thinkers aren’t near extinction.  This great nation, which has long been known and lauded for its individualism and self-determination, can’t afford it.

But all is not lost.  There are still two good things I can say about the system from my perspective.  First, I like the idea of giving political consultants fits based on guessing whether I’m a feminist or a fiscal conservative, a liberal entertainer or a conservative small businesswoman, a momma desperate for child care or one decidedly anti-preschool.  And second, the delicious thought that male political consultants across the nation are perpetually struggling with the age-old question:

“What do women want?”

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