(Cross Posted from The Blog Roundup).
John Emerson over at Seeing the Forest has a really interesting take on the reasons why many "soft" Republican voters in Red States voted for Bush without necessarily having strong opinions or even knowing much about his policy positions. As he points out, many voters are actually uninformed (or worse, misinformed) about the issues, so they go by what are apparently (to the more informed, committed, and politically involved among us) trivial impressions of the candidates and their policies. He takes a long look at why this might be (emphasis mine):
Ambience is important. The ambient politics of the free media is right-wing or right-center. This is what you passively get when you switch on a TV or overhear someone's radio playing. There's really no liberal media out there; the so-called liberals on TV are either stooges and fall guys, or else centrists. We can't afford to continue to allow the Republicans to dominate that space. When Air America went on the air here in Portland (already a fairly liberal town) it really changed the atmosphere. Suddenly, people would be hearing a liberal point of view by accident, and some of them started to believe that there actually were real liberals out there, and not just the black junkie prostitute welfare-mother Communist liberals Rush talks about all the time.
A high proportion of Americans (mostly in the Red States) never hear a liberal opinion, ever. For a lot of them, some form of cheesy conservatism becomes the automatic default position, even though they may never have thought about it for a minute. For these people, free liberal media (even if they never listened to it closely) would give liberalism a respectability, plausibility, and reality that it hadn't had before.
As I've pointed out in the past, we know from studies by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) that most Bush supporters don't actually understand his positions on a whole range of issues. Maybe George Lakoff is correct in asserting that the Republicans have defined the frames of public debate, and that by arguing using the frames which they have already defined, the Democrats simply reinforce their frames, and that any facts which contradict those frames are simply ignored. There is certainly some truth to this.
But perhaps it really is also about ambience. Most people (in red states particularly) never hear anything else but the standard center-right, Republican-owned, pro-conservative media's agenda, which has no reason or incentive to discuss the issues in any terms other than those which Karl Rove and his emissaries choose. In my view, that's what really decided this election, not just "values", same-sex marriage, or the turnout of the Christian right. Yes, they all contributed, just as the deficit, the mess in Iraq, and black voters contributed to Kerry's 57 million+ votes.
Perhaps what's really encouraging in all this, is that despite the significant right-wing ambience in many states, so many people still managed to vote for reality.
- Trendar