Some folks are saying McCain’s idea was to look presidential and non-partisan, but that’s too transparent a ploy to fool anyone but dedicated McCainiacs. Plus, the idea that Presidential candidates shouldn’t be expected to handle public speaking during a crisis doesn’t hold much water. (Diagram from indexed<\/a> and via Matt<\/a>.)<\/p>\nAre McCain’s advisors so deep in the game that they didn’t realize what a bad idea this was? Or did they realize that it was a bad idea, but couldn’t dissuade McCain?<\/p>\n
It’s enough to make me speculate that McCain is having severe butterflies in his stomach about his debate performance — enough to be looking for an “out.” (Of course, it’s common for nervous debaters to shine once the debate begins, so even if that’s true I don’t take much comfort from it.)<\/p>\n
I’m a fan of the presidential debates — politics is the closest our country ever comes to a national sport I have any interest in — but I’m not convinced they matter. At this late point in the process, there are only two kinds of voters: High-information voters, who already know who they’re going to vote for, and low-information voters, who still haven’t been decided, but won’t watch the debates, because if they were the sort of people who watched debates then they wouldn’t be low-information voters and they’d already know who they’re going to vote for.<\/p>\n
So why the debates? Well, for me, it’s the entertainment value. But from the candidates’ perspective, I think they’re just hoping to get the media to repeat (over and over and over) a sound bite or narrative that makes them look good, or for their opponent to have a genuinely horribly and telegenic gaffe. If the media repeats it 50,000 times, then maybe enough of those low-information voters will hear about it so it’ll sway a tiny percent of votes.<\/p>\n
So if the debates matter, it’s only because they can have a third-hand effect — the debates effect the media, and the media, maybe<\/i>, effects low-information swing voters. But according to political scientists, even that is unlikely. Usually debates don’t have any detectable effect on election outcomes.<\/p>\n
So maybe McCain and his campaign people aren’t making a mistake; maybe they understand, correctly, that there are weeks of new flash in the pan news stories to come before the election, and it really won’t matter if McCain attends this debate or not.<\/p>\n
In a two-party system, it’s probably inevitable that elections are decided by low-information swing voters, because both parties have an incentive to move as far to the middle as they can without losing too much of their base, leading them to split the high-information partisans more or less evenly. So it’s the small minority of low-information voters who end up holding the deciding vote. ((There are probably some people out there who are high-information non-partisans, or who are high-information but vote for third party candidates, but I think they’re a small enough minority not to matter.))<\/p>\n
I have a fantasy of living in a society in which voters decide who to vote based on serious policy and moral debates. That’s why I like watching the debates, and that’s why I blog. But make no mistake, it’s a fantasy. Who wins the election does matter<\/a> for substantial policy reasons; but those substantial policy questions don’t have any causal effect on who wins <\/em>the election.<\/p>\n Does anyone know if low-information voters decide the elections in countries with multiple-party systems?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m fascinated by the story of McCain saying he’s not attending the debate, because it’s such an obvious losing position for McCain to take. Either he doesn’t show up, in which case Obama will have an exceptionally well-publicized opportunity to … Continue reading