Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Culturally divided

Howard Fineman is rightly astonished that the electoral race is not over. Indeed, given the mood of the country Obama should be 30 points ahead. The fact that he is not points to to something interesting: US elections are about conflicting ideologies (as opposed to conflicting interests) much more than they used to be. Many people don't vote for a political program, they vote based on cultural identification. And many people simply cannot identify culturally with Obama.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Over 30%? No presidential election in the past 50 years has had a margin of over 25%, and these were all incumbents (more or less). LBJ of course took over for JFK.

1972 Nixon, Richard 60.7% (vote) 23.2% (margin)
1964 Lyndon B. Johnson 61.1% (vote) 22.6% (margin)
1984 Ronald Reagan 58.8% (vote) 18.2% (margin)

wikipedia link