In Search of Rational Voters

"The people have spoken—the bastards!" It can be an effective line, especially when candidates employ it jokingly to lighten the somber mood of their supporters after a deflating loss at the polls. But it's also a dangerous thing to say: If there's one thing any aspirant for any office is reluctant to do, it's insult the electorate. He may need them again in two years.

Still, every once in a while a losing candidate has the guts and irreverence to try some variant of this jibe. The political gadfly Dick Tuck, defeated in a state Senate campaign in California in the 1950s, seems to have introduced it to modern campaigning. The equally witty Morris Udall used it on the night he lost the Wisconsin presidential primary to Jimmy Carter in 1976.

I don't know where the line originated, and I don't particularly care. What interests me is that this is about as far as any losing candidate is ever willing to go in taking on the voters. It's barely acceptable, on rare occasions, to make a joking reference to them as hostile ingrates. What you can't do is question their mental capacity. No candidate has ever begun a concession speech by saying, "The voters have spoken—the fools!"

That's in large part because it would be received almost universally as a gesture of tasteless arrogance. But there's another reason politicians carefully avoid questioning the intelligence of the electorate. They avoid it because they want desperately to believe that the American voters, whatever mistakes they may make, are at bottom rational and competent.

It's not just candidates and office-holders who feel need to believe this. Scholars who study voting behavior feel it, too. V. O. Key Jr., perhaps the most eminent American political scientist of the mid-20th century, wrote a book in the early 1960s called "The Responsible Electorate" and stated in the very beginning that its purpose was to convince readers that "voters are not fools." Thirty years later, another respected scholar, Samuel Popkin, made similar arguments at greater length in a book he chose to call "The Reasoning Voter."

Journalists generally concur. Cynical as they tend to be about candidates and office-holders, they rarely blame the failures of American democracy on deficiencies in the electorate. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have read an op-ed column by a political analyst declaring that, on one important issue or another, "the people are way ahead of the politicians." Often, what this means is that the voters happen to agree with the writer on that issue.