A 800 issue person

Samuel L. Popkin, author of "The Reasoning Voter," suggests that Americans' awareness of issues has been growing for decades, but argues that voters use shortcuts to make judgments about the candidates, relying on things like endorsements, the advice of friends, and the candidate's party.


Amy Gershkoff, who wrote her Princeton dissertation on issues and voting behavior, says that
"many Americans vote because of one or two or three issues...they might care a whole lot about health care or prayer in schools and not at all about foreign policy, and maybe that leaves them sounding dumb when they're asked about Iraq. But they know enough about the issues they care about, and that's what they vote on."

For a girl who spends days researching all the judges on the ballot, forgive me, but this really pisses me off. I was asked by a poll once if I would vote for a candidate who would do away with freedom of choice rights if he or she agreed with the majority of my other positions. My answer, while it made me cringe, was yes. I brought this subject up later, for better or worse, at a bar. My more hardcore friends were... disappointed, to say the least. Allowing for any alteration in Roe v Wade is akin to blasphemy among many of the more lib crowd.

But how can anybody vote on one issue? Everything in politics is connected, and I'd rather give up a right to save 50 others, or eat a tax to save education, knowing that, in the long run, it would save the entire country money because we'd have a more educated base that would be able to support themselves. But maybe this is a generational thing, I don't know.