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Kenton looks into the regional internals of PPP gubernatorial polls and rightly worries that Democrats could lose the suburbs long-term. I've worried that suburban voters are too far left and too insulated for the good of Virginia (Democrats or otherwise), but perhaps that will prove to have been a short-term phenomenon.
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Happy dog is happy.
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Suburban voters are not too far left, they are low-information voters. These are the distracted-drivers of the political world. Between shuttling the kids to practice, and dealing with their world, they hardly have time to pay attention. Deeds has not been able to distinguish himself in a way that has impact. They live amongst wingnuts like McDonnell. He’s the harmless guy on the corner with the well-groomed look and the cheerleader wife. Creigh stutters and just isn’t cool. And since the candidates don’t have a running mate, there is no Sarah Palin to create those “you’re sleeping in the guest room” discussions that define these kind of decisions.
Jim Gilmore is simply a failed Senate candidate. He is not the father of “No Car Tax” or more specifically the centralization of State authority. And the ghost of Mark Warner Past is someone the suburbanites have not yet met. The wheel turns.
I think you’re onto something there.
Everyone likes to think their favored candidate would garner more votes if people were just more informed. I think the Ron Paul supporters owned that line last election.
I don’t know what that has to be so in this instance, Jon. The point here is that busy voters will cast their vote based on little information, which to say the dominant narrative. The dominant narrative four years ago and eight years ago strongly favored the Democratic candidates. Now it favors the Republican. That’s not to say that more information would cause them to support Democrats any more than it would cause them to have supported Republicans.
Low-information is the last thing I see in suburban voters in my corner of Fairfax. Have we forgotten where everyone that lives here goes to work? If you stood on my roof, blindfolded yourself, and hurled a rock in any direction, chances are you’d hit a masters degree-clutching cog in the political cottage industry who has nothing better to do than chew on the political affairs of the day (if they’re not Hatched). People who willingly put up with the nightmarish traffic, absurdist sprawl, and dizzyingly high cost of living are most likely here on some form of political or civil service assignment. In fact, the suburban voters I encounter are often too high-information in the sense that they seriously practice strategic voting, a vexing phenomenon that our plurality vote system is prone to.
The issue with suburban voters is not that of education (suburban voters are the best-educated voters of them all, most likely to have college degrees and postgraduate study under their belt), it is of tenure. Virginia’s suburban voters by and large came from somewhere else. As such, their ties to state elections are not nearly as strong as they are to federal elections. However, recent Census data seems to indicate that the flood of new suburban migrants seemed to have largely halted–gone are the days of double-digit percentage growth in exurban locales–and as the average tenure of the population increases I expect them to become better marinated in Commonwealth politics.
The Richmond suburbs of Chesterfield and Henrico have never been bastions of liberalism.
Kenton; You say they are not tied to state elections, I call them distracted, low information voters, either way they aren’t engaged voters.
As to smart well educated citizens – when you get a few years older, have 3 kids, a mortgage, a business and a million related distractions your education will be no match for the decline of your cognitive powers!
I can’t tell you how many people I know that will, in a moment of candor, confide that their children have made them stupid. The tragedy is that the little biters are simultaneously getting smarter, and more challenging. But this is only part of the story, a year in NOVA traffic turned me into a lunatic, and I resigned myself to the slow lane here in the sticks. Life is cruel, but especially so to the smarty pants who build their gilded cage in the ‘burbs.
Everytime I creep along I66 or I64 at 15mph surrounded by seemingly serene Fairfaxons, or Henricians in their matching steel boxes I wonder what combination of meditation or dementia has prepared them for the insanity of their circumstances. Either way, it makes them vulnerable to the onslaught of packaged, slick candidates like Bob McDonnell.
this is why the “Mudcat” neo-conservative/opt out of the public option/distance yourself from Obama campaign has been a disaster.
You have a an aggrieved and motivated R base how the hell are you supposed to beat that when you do everything you possible can to depress your own base?
“If you stood on my roof, blindfolded yourself, and hurled a rock in any direction, chances are you’d hit a masters degree-clutching cog in the political cottage industry who has nothing better to do than chew on the political affairs of the day (if they’re not Hatched). People who willingly put up with the nightmarish traffic, absurdist sprawl, and dizzyingly high cost of living are most likely here on some form of political or civil service assignment.”
Um, Kenton? People who work for the “political cottage industry” are not swing voters. They’re the most regular, hyper-partisan voters you can imagine. The hypothetical voter you profiled does exist, and she does live south of the Potomac in the exurbs of Washington, D.C., but she’s not a driving force in any way whatsover behind the exodus from Creigh Deeds and the Democratic ticket. You need to look at all the voters who *don’t* fit your idea of the stereotypical Fairfax resident — the barista at Starbucks who can’t understand why he still works there after getting an associate degree from NOVA community college, the waitress at the Cheesecake Factory who voted for Obama but doesn’t even realize there’s an election next week. Those people live and work in Fairfax, VA, too.
I don’t think that’s true. Rather, they just choose to do other things with their time. And as listening in on almost any conversation at a Tyson’s Corner Starbucks will illustrate, it’s rarely something useful or important.
Damnit, Sam! Stop beating me to responses!
(I’m amused, though, considering the “argument” we had over Bryan Caplan’s “the myth of the rational voter.” I *knew* you’d agree with me eventually!)
Also, MB’s point is quite right- there’s not a Fairfax voting bloc, and there’s certainly not what Kenton seems to think exists in Fairfax. There’s some of it, but there are college students, the folks Sam descibed, and, more importantly, the folks MB described. They’re the ones who will, due to a variety of factors, use some heuristic in light of actually thinking about an issue or pick something they think will work to their own self-interest, and, more often than not, choose incorrectly because heuristics usually are bullshit.
DA elections are a great example- you gotta be tough on crime, but studies show that in non-election seasons, people favor more leniency (same is true right after a violent crime- we gotta lock em up- and that drops after a month or so).add in the fact that very few people understand what we do in a da’d office in full unless they’re criminal attorneys and, its almost impossible to make a good, informed choice. Not becauae you’re not intelligent- but because given the choice between understanding thoroughly enough to make a good choice and talking at a starbucks… most people choose starbucks- and since most people are busy and don’t deal with the da directly,in the short selfish run, that’s rationa for them. You risk a crummy da or a da that does a good job but does one because he doesn’t fulfill all the zero tolerance, super tough on crime bs he said to get elected–and then he doesn’t get re-elected(not in Philly or NYC I hasten to add!those are the only 2 offices I have experience with though but, especially Philly, both offices have great DAs, great chiefs, and great adas.).
“I can’t tell you how many people I know that will, in a moment of candor, confide that their children have made them stupid.”
Bubby, thank God! I thought it was just me!