The Most Interesting Congressional Race In 2012…

Burt Likko in reply to trizzlor says:

1a. Ms. Sinema is bisexual, which isn’t the same thing as gay. Perhaps to folks who don’t spend a lot of time parsing out what those words mean, they may be functional equivalents, as in “not heterosexual like me.” I think most people know the difference, but then again, I thought most people knew what that rainbow flag stands for and I was wrong about that.

1b. “Nontheistic” is Ms. Sinema’s term to describe her belief structure; it may or may not have the same meaning as whatever it was when the Gallup poll answered questions about atheist candidates. Some of the voters will (correctly) learn what Ms. Sinema’s beliefs are and a sub-group of them will care; others will either not know or not care. One of the things that will be interesting to me is to what extent the voters do make a political preference decision with that factor in mind.

2. Similarly, running for Congress isn’t the same thing as running for President. Maybe similar enough that the Gallup poll is a good cognate. But maybe not. While the average voter may not be hugely well-informed, I would postulate that the average voter attaches greater overall importance to a vote for President than a vote for a representative in the lower house of Congress. Personally, I look at a candidate for Congress with a different rubric than I look at a candidate for President: I like to see leadership experience and good judgments about individual character in a President, where I like to see good listening skills, knowledge of local economic issues, and evidence of successful teamwork in a legislator. Being a solipsistic egoist about such matters, I can only imagine that other people are just like me.

3. The idea that voters would respond differently to being asked about an actual person like Ms. Sinema or Mr. Parker, as opposed to a faceless amalgam of adjectives, is one that I think may well have some merit to it; your comment implies that you are somewhat dismissive of that possibility. But I can see someone saying “Wow, a ‘gay atheist’ sounds like someone very different from me, and that makes me uncomfortable,” but a moment later looking at a picture of Ms. Sinema, and saying, “She looks like my next-door neighbor, so yeah, I could see myself voting for her, all other things being equal.”

4. I find it distasteful to even point out the mixed-race marriage issue and the race issue with respect to Mr. Parker, because I would prefer to think that those are non-issues in today’s world. Black candidates for Congress do get elected, both as Republicans and Democrats, from majority-white districts; a black Congressional candidate seemed to steal the hearts of everyone at the RNC on Tuesday night; Barack Obama did get elected President; another prominent mixed-race marriage, that of Clarence and Virginia Thomas, has been well-accepted by the political establishment. But recent experience on these very pages suggests that considering only the happy news about race would be a fiction, albeit a pleasant one, and in fact there are all sorts of ways, not all of which are very pleasant, that racial biases sneak in to political decisions. (Other distasteful biases too, of course, but race seems the most explosive.)

5. So maybe you’re right, and I’m giving voters more credit than they deserve to suggest that voters would deny that these things are unimportant to them. Seeing the same poll, I think they’d be faster to make such a denial with respect to Mr. Parker’s circumstances than Ms. Sinema’s. But we’ll have some insight into that in November with election returns and exit polls. That’s why I thought this particular matchup was of particular interest, and that’s why I chose to highlight it for the Readers here.Report