Forina claims that this idea of "sorting" is that as time has progressed people are changing their views to make them more consistent with the party they affiliate with and that young voters are joining the party that is most consistent with their views. This has made the distinction between parties and candidates larger, but really people are just "choosing" from the choices they have and what they feel is the best of the two choices. It seems that these days people are choosing parties based on a few issues and that since the media makes it very known what a lot of the main issues one party supports over the other, the rest of the issues kind of take shape and follow in the voters minds.
I analyzed the exit polls from CNN.com for both the 2006 and 2008 elections and saw that these exit polls seemed to strengthen this argument for "sorting".
In 2006 the exit polls for California showed that 94% of those who identified as Democrat voted for the democratic nominee. In addition to this 85% of those who disapproved the war in Iraq voted for the democratic nominee, 71% of those who wanted to find a legal status for immigrants voted for the democratic nominee and 72% of those who thought abortion should be legal voted for the democratic nominee. All of these ideals are ones that are closely associated to the Democratic Party and shows that most (not all) of those who identified as Democrat voted Democrat and were behind the policies. The same held true for the Republicans.
In the 2008 national exit polls 89% of those who identified as Democrat voted for Obama, 89% who identified as liberal voted for Obama, and 76% of those who disapproved of the war voted Obama. These exit polls showed that Those who identified as Democrat seemed to identify as liberal and many of those individuals also were opposed to the war. Less of a majority of the Protestant and Born again vote were votes for Obama but the difference between Protestants was only 10%. Obama had the majority of votes from Catholics, Jewish, Other, and No religious affiliation. Although he had the majority of votes from Catholics it was a small majority and the majority of Catholics who attended church more than once a month voted for McCain. This shows that the conservative religious ideals of the Republicans fit in still even though it is not a huge divide. It helps to defend the claim that this type of "sorting" goes on and people change their views to go along with their party.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Your information is good, but i do have a few disagreements. I do not believe that your interpretation of peoples voting is correct. SOME people may change their ideas about topics based on the party they support, but with a newley educated population coming up this is not what I believe to be true. People that are young and educated choose a party based on what fits them the best. If they have a few differences it is OK. You have to choose which party works the best. If their are to many cleavages then you stay independent and again choose at election time what candidate, not party in this case, works best for you and your ideas.
ReplyDelete