Is There Hope? Maybe If Voters Get A Clue

I had been planning on writing the previous post for a few days now and planning to follow up with this one (as this made me think back to some data we saw this spring from Pew Research), asking how could we be moving in the direction our candidates seem to be moving (Up and Right on the political compass), when polling data shows the public moving in a different direction.

When yesterday lo' and Behold an article in the Washington Post explains it all, it's all about controlling the network dynamics, which is what the Republic party has done so well.

Let's start here, we should be seeing a major political shift as the American Public's moderating political views and the Republic party's continued drift to th right and toward authoritarianism come into conflict.
As Pew points out;

Increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public
concern about income inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive
national security policies have improved the political landscape for the
Democrats as the 2008 presidential campaign gets underway.

At the same time, many of the key trends that nurtured the Republican
resurgence in the mid-1990s have moderated, according to Pew's longitudinal
measures of the public's basic political, social and economic values. The
proportion of Americans who support traditional social values has edged
downward since 1994, while the proportion of Americans expressing strong
personal religious commitment also has declined modestly.

Even more striking than the changes in some core political and social values
is the dramatic shift in party identification that has occurred during the
past five years. In 2002, the country was equally divided along partisan
lines: 43% identified with the Republican Party or leaned to the GOP, while
an identical proportion said they were Democrats. Today, half of the public
(50%) either identifies as a Democrat or says they lean to the Democratic
Party, compared with 35% who align with the GOP.

And even some pretty graphs to:

Clearly the general public as a whole and the republic party core are moving
in opposite directions, yet as Pew also pointed out;

Yet the Democrats' growing advantage in party identification is tempered by
the fact that the Democratic Party's overall standing with the public is no
better than it was when President Bush was first inaugurated in 2001.
Instead, it is the Republican Party that has rapidly lost public support,
particularly among political independents. Faced with an unpopular president
who is waging an increasingly unpopular war, the proportion of Americans who
hold a favorable view of the Republican Party stands at 41%, down 15 points
since January 2001. But during that same period, the proportion expressing a
positive view of Democrats has declined by six points, to 54%.

So how is it that with Bush tanking and public support of traditional
Democratic principles increasing, we still see decline in the approval
ratings of Democrats?

Well Shankar Vedantam of the Washington Post takes a look at a study on Network Dynamics, which used music for testing, and extrapolates it to the Iowa Caucuses;

The experiment, published in Science, suggests that when large networks of
people evaluate something together -- and it does not matter whether we are
talking about songs or "American Idol" contestants or presidential
candidates -- their conclusions are not only powerfully shaped by the views
of others, but by the network that binds them together. The Iowa caucuses,
which involve people watching one another and moving from one candidate's
camp to another, have different network properties than a primary where
voters don't have such real-time feedback.

Watts, a sociologist at Columbia University, said his research challenges
central beliefs we have about why some musicians become stars and s?me
politicians become presidents. Quality matters, but when voters intensely
watch one another, the success of candidates depends at least as much on
network dynamics as it does on the quality of the candidates themselves.
Because network dynamics are not governed by intuitively simple rules of
cause and effect -- depending on where they are in a network, people with
strong opinions might end up with little influence, while the weak opinions
of others get greatly magnified -- networks regularly produce outcomes that
are partly arbitrary. Each of the eight music "universes" started out the
same, but for no good reason, each went off in its own direction.

But clearly these dynamics work on the grand scale of a national election
and as Shankar notes;

Seeing a presidential election in those terms, however, is troubling: It
means that, every four years, we entrust our future to a roll of the dice.

So even though there clearly is a widening gap between the principles of the
republic party and where America stands, as long as we are unwilling as
individuals to critically analyze the candidates and their party's
positions, rather than relying on sound bites, talking heads and 30 second
attack ads to determine our electoral preferences we will get the government
we deserve.