Conviction, not opinion polls, offers best political direction
If you follow polls, you may have noticed how voters increasingly seem to resist attempts to stick them firmly into any camp–conservative, liberal or even moderate. Or, rather, they feel free to jump from camp to camp, depending on the issue and how the pollster presents it to them.
There are three possible explanation: 1) voters are becoming more fickle; 2), they’re getting more selective; or 3), they are just being polled wrong. Or maybe 4), “all of the above.” In any case, the growing volatility of polling seems to pose problems for political candidates as never before.
The fashion of 1992, arguably, was liberal, even if voters thought they were getting in the Clintons something Midler than turned out to be the case. In 1994, the mood was decidedly conservative, even if the differences in the two parties’ vote totals, district by district, were small. We have had years with avowedly moderate electoral moods, too, of course; one thinks of 1952 and 1956, the Eisenhower elections.
But moderation in politics, while commendable as a temperament, is seldom much more than mere compromise between whatever the liberals and conservatives want. Its position is determined by others. When the safe path for travel is not down the middle of the road the voters reject it.
In any case, public opinion surveys do not show people splitting the difference between the conservatives and liberals so much as picking and choosing among the various positions and their supporting arguments.
Take immigration. Pat Buchanan erred greatly in thinking that because a majority of people are disturbed about illegal immigration that they are angry about legal immigration, too. On affirmative action, surveys show antagonism to discrimination on race, ethnic or gender ground, but antagonism also–and often in the same people–to the quota system that affirmative action has become.
Then there is the issue of Social Security, long considered the Bermuda Triangle of politics. Any candidate who wandered into it was likely to meet disaster. But focus groups held on the subject by advocates of using the private sector to rescue the system before it goes bankrupt in the coming century show that voters actually are open to solutions if they both spare the elderly cuts and provide more savings potential for young workers and their families.
What counts in these focus groups, apparently, is not just what change is proposed, but how it is described. There is a world of difference, for example, between “privatizing Social Security” to “reform” it (which elderly people, especially, don’t want to do) and “using the private sector” to “rescue it.”
A similar track of rhetorical nuance must be followed on the Medicare issue. Republican congressmen have been admonished to point out that to “strengthen” Medicare it is necessary for its costs “to increase more slowly.”Their case is strong (as the bipartisan Social Security Trustees report shows), but its description is almost Jesuitical in its cautious enunciation of nuance.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are charging in with the most broad and brutal denunciations, believing that nuance is not their friend on this issue.
But maybe that is a mistake this year.On issue after issue, one senses voters trying hard to sort out the issues, trying to separate fact from falsehood, truth from hyperbole. In the early primaries, there was great sympathy for Steve Forbes’ flat tax idea, but voters ultimately were not convinced. Does that mean the idea is dead? No, it just didn’t jell. Voters still are trying to figure out how the present cumbersome and unproductive tax system might still be streamlined.
Even on abortion, the two major sides–pro-life and pro-choice–have learned that they cannot count on how the voters view the subject, for the majority of voters seem–but only seem–to have contrary views. Majorities both oppose abortion in general and don’t want it made illegal. Voters thus appear to be waiting for another description of both the problem and the solution. Perhaps these voters are being fickle, irresponsibly ducking hard choices? Or maybe they are just demanding better-refined choices?
The other possibility is that we mostly are witnessing new problems in the way public opinion is being measured. Karlyn Keene Bowman, a polling expert at the American Enterprise Institute, warns that, “There are just too many polls being taken that word questions badly or that ask them in the heat of a particular crisis” and thus misrepresent public opinion. Current polls on U.S.-Japan security arrangements fit the latter category. Also, Bowman notes, some polls seek the public’s views on intricate subjects on which people simply are ill-informed or don’t have well-developed views; she cites this year’s telecommunications legislation as an example. With some polling outfits tied to particular media outlets these days, it also is possible that some polls are being pushed forward to gain headlines rather than to explain complexity. All this reminds us that polls can confuse as well as illuminate public life.
Regardless, democracy in the end is not about polls and it’s not about group thinking. The failure of all polls is to see the complex patterns we each make in reaching our political views. Real people are not one-dimensional characters in a political cartoon. They blend all kinds of concerns and interests, some selfishly, some idealistically. And, yes, sometimes they do change their minds.
That doesn’t leave politicians with any safe course, except maybe this: Work out a program for the country that comports with your own philosophy and explain it carefully; and then stay with it. Voters these days may or may not be especially fickle, but they surely tend not to like fickleness in their politicians. In the end they vote for the person they trust, not just the one they agree with.