Reductive Thinking About The Nomination Campaign

by: Chris Bowers

Tue Mar 11, 2008 at 14:40

• More people over the age of 60 have voted for Barack Obama than people under 30. More people in Generation X have voted for Barack Obama than people over the age of 60. And more Boomers have voted for Obama than Generation Xers. In other words, Obama has received fewer votes from Generation Y than from any other generation in this nomination campaign.
  

• Fewer than half of Hillary Clinton's votes have come from white women.

• Barack Obama has received about 60% more votes from whites than he has from African-Americans.

And there is more, too, including that nearly 40% of pledged delegates from caucuses and conventions have gone to a candidate other than Barack Obama. While I still think it is possible to predict how somehow will vote in the primary with reasonable accuracy once a complete psychographic profile of that person is developed, it is a lot more complex than the simplistic and reductivist "young voters" or "white women" arguments that are being thrown around. There are literally dozens of factors at play, not just age, gender, and race / ethnicity.

Although I lack the academic language to define it, I feel as though we have entered an era of a rapidly expanding number of micro-public spheres. It is part of a slow, but long-term and continuous, movement away from a modernist era that was dominated by a small number of enormous public, civic, educational, media, religious and social institutions. The proliferation of the decentralization of political media through the blogosphere is a good example of this, especially if one considers that many large blogs have numerous internal factions and that blogs themselves can be seen as reasonably distinct from other forms of political media. In addition to the many social changes this long-term shift will cause, it will also continually make voter targeting an increasingly complex and multi-faceted task.