Dark Matter: August 2008

And the demographic is...

Women.
Maybe I'm slow at connecting the dots, but it seems to me that Obama has spent a lot of time courting women voters. Lets analyze shall we? Lets just start out by stating the obvious. Every candidate wants all voters. Racist, sexist, misogynist, feminist, whatever. You might not cater to them, but you want any vote you can take. The real win comes from taking votes away from someone else. You want undecided voters, but you'll get quite a surge from mind change voters. They count not only +1 for you, but -1 for your opponent. The whole 'zero sum' game.

Now, if we are honest with ourselves, we will acknowledge that there are a lot of superficial people out there. I will hypothesize that there is a large overlap between the superficial voters, and the voters who are not interested in politics. The superficial voters include people who vote on these issues: race, sex, appearance, age, etc. There are others, I'm sure, but these give us enough. I won't bother going through all the rigor of demonstrating how each of these things could be applied positively or negatively to each candidate; may it suffice to say that is the case. But I would then that a superficial voter who is not interested in politics is, by definition, not someone who has made up their mind about voting for a particular candidate.

Now, these superficial uninterested voters are still polled, and they are likely to be the ones who are leaners. That is, they like A today and maybe B tomorrow, all dependent on time of day, weather, and most importantly, what commercials they saw last night.

Now it turns out that women vote more than men. It also turns out that women make up the majority of 'swing' voters. And now, I humbly submit, that the 'swing' voter is made up primarily of superficial uninterested voters.
(please send hatemail to bob@bob.gov)

The superficial uninterested voter (SUV) is not a bad person. I am certainly not suggesting that they ought not be allowed to vote. But I now offer this thesis as an explanation as to why the political landscape is the way it is. Why candidates reduce their platforms to catch-phrase platitudes accuse the other of being elitist, out of touch, or, God forbid, rich (as if both candidates aren't).

The SUV's by their nature are swing voters of the worst kind. They'll go from voting for A because shes a woman, to voting for B because he's black, to voting for C because he's a mormon, and back to A because she cried. What I am attacking is the reasoning of the SUV, or lack thereof. Not that they don't have a reason, but that they have no principles, at least not any good ones, and so they are subject to a multitude of reasons and are likely to pull the lever influenced most by whatever happened the night before, or perhaps, if it was good enough, the infamous October surprise!

So when I started writing this post, I thought I would be writing about how Obama catered to women as evidenced by many things:
Appearances and Interviews in MANY women's magazines while comparably fewer interviews with news media
Some of his responses at saddleback. Notice that the first two people mentioned as 'wise counselors' were his wife and grandmother?

There are others, but I'll now point out that the latest news is that McCain has chosen Gov. Palin of Alaska. This is an interesting development, and I think it may be a turning point for McCain.