The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Don't Vote the Issues
Tuesday - November 04, 2008 12:36 PM in
by Peter Leppik
It's election day, and about time. Tomorrow we can all go back to work and stop obsessing about politics.
My mother used to be a state legislator (for twelve years), and what I learned about the legislative process from her has convinced me that most issue-oriented voters make their decisions the wrong way.
The usual process many voters and nearly all special-interest groups go through is to compile a checklist of issues, compare the candidates' positions on those issues, and choose the candidate whose issues best match the voter's (or interest group's).
Most elected officials, however, don't have the ability to make any sort of mark on more than one or two issues. It takes a lot of time, energy, and political effort to pass any substantive legislation, so in order to be effective anywhere, a legislator has to focus on just the issue most important to him or her.
Issues less important to a given politician won't get much attention; and some legislators may act against their position on a less-important issue in order to gain ground on something more important (this is called "compromise," and without it nothing happens in government).
So in terms of whether a given politician is going to have any effect on a given issue, it's more important to know what the one or two most important issues are for that politician than how he stands on a lengthy checklist of issues.
To put this in concrete terms, let's suppose that I care about three issues in this election: I oppose lemur control, I favor stop-sign reduction, and I favor kimchi import controls. I consider all these issues about equally important to me.
Bob and Jane are running for congress in my district. Bob opposes lemur control, favors stop-sign reduction, and opposes kimchi import controls; Bob's most important issue is kimchi import controls.
Jane, on the other hand, opposes lemur control, opposes stop-sign reduction, and opposes kimchi import controls; Jane's most important issue is lemur control.
Just counting the issues, I should vote for Bob since he agrees with me on two of the three issues. However, the one he disagrees with me about is also his most important issue and the one he's likely to actually spend time and attention working towards.
So in reality, I should vote for Jane even though she disagrees with me on two of the three issues, because the issue where we agree is also her most important issue and one she's likely to promote in congress.
When you decide who to vote for, don't look at the laundry list of issues--instead, focus on the one or two issues each candidate feels is most important. Once you've gotten past those couple of issues, matters of character, leadership style, partisanship, etc. are going to tell you a lot more about how that person will behave in office than the stated positions on all the minor issues.
| | |