The Lohan Effect: Will Romney Get a Boost from Low-Information Voters?
I feel like I am living in an age where the future vision of Idiocracy is coming true.
http://swampland.time.com/2012/10/15/the-lohan-effect-will-romney-get-a-boost-from-low-information-voters/
The Lohan Effect: Will Romney Get a Boost from Low-Information Voters?
By ALEX ALTMAN | @aaltman82 | October 15, 2012
As his standing in the polls improves, Mitt Romney is piling up public endorsements from a new cohort of voters: the celebrity-train-wreck set.
The latest celebrity to climb aboard the Romney bandwagon is actress and Page Six piñata Lindsay Lohan. ‘I just think employment is really important right now,’ Lohan said. ‘So, as of now, Mitt Romney.’ She joins Clueless actress Stacey Dash, wrestler Hulk Hogan and adult-film star Jenna Jameson on the Celebs for Romney booster squad. How much does this matter? Narrowly speaking, not at all. None of these people live in competitive states, it’s unlikely their opinions will sway a soul, and wealthier people tend to vote Republican anyway based on their economic self-interest. (If you don’t buy those charts, take it from Jameson: ‘When you’re rich, you want a Republican in office.’)
But the celebrity migration to the Romney camp, as Walter Hickey of Business Insider noted, may be a symptom of a potentially serious problem for Barack Obama: an indication that so-called low-information voters, many of whom supported Obama in 2008, will abandon the President’s re-election bid. The conviction that undecided voters will break late against the incumbent has always been a pillar of the Romney campaign’s strategy.
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Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, there is reason to lament the attention lavished on a relatively tiny cadre of undecided voters, many of whom are ambivalent or indifferent because their grasp of the facts is hazy. Ezra Klein wrote recently about a Saturday Night Live bit that lampooned undecided voters. ‘We’re not impressed by political spin and 30-second sound bites,’ says one of the skit’s actors. ‘Before you get our vote, you’re going to have to answer some questions. Questions like, ‘When is the election?’ ‘How soon do we have to decide?’ ‘What are the names of the two people running?’ ‘
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Take, for example, another celebrity Romney fan whose endorsement caused a hullabaloo recently. Buzz Bissinger is the author of Friday Night Lights and a native, he wrote in his endorsement, of the nation’s ‘nexus of liberalogy,’ [sic] the Upper West Side of Manhattan. ‘There is a part of me that feels like a traitor,’ Bissinger wrote, in a kind of hyperbolic confessional designed to imbue his opinion with the gravitas of the converted. ‘I fear that I will lose friends, some of whom I hold inside my heart.’ And yet there he was, bravely risking the wrath of his wife and the brie-and-Chardonnay set by outing himself as a Mitt Romney supporter.
So how did Romney win him over? In sum, he spoke faster at the debate in Denver. ‘Romney did not simply act like he wanted to be president. He wants to be president,’ Bizzinger said, with no evidence at all. ‘He showed vigor, and enthusiasm, and excitement, a man who wants to lead.’ And Obama? He ‘dipped into the podium as if avoiding the smell of something rotten, acting above the very idea that a debate does provide a pivotal referendum on his first term,’ Bissinger wrote. ‘I am not sure Obama really wants to be president in any practical way.’
This is the kind of trenchant analysis that moves undecided voters toward a candidate. Mocked for the flimsiness of his logic, Bissinger penned a follow-up piece to defend himself against an onslaught of criticism that dubbed him a classic low-information voter. His retort? ‘I spend five to six hours preparing for [a radio show] each day and do nothing now but read politics from a variety of differing viewpoints,’ he wrote. ‘I may be a misinformed voter but I am not a low-information one.’ Misinformed or ill informed, this is the type of voter that both sides need to win.
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/10/15/the-lohan-effect-will-romney-get-a-boost-from-low-information-voters/#ixzz29UlJqCaM